The Ways

Here are a couple of the ways we're doing things differently since living in Germany.

1) Airing the house and linens.

I remember seeing this years ago when I traveled to Europe. I wondered why on earth people were hanging their blankets out the window! 

See?

See?

See?

I think it's two reasons. 1) Air out the house. Every morning, no matter how cold, windows are opened to refresh the house from all the nighttime heat. It's actually in our rental agreement to air out the house for thirty minutes every day. 2) Exposing your bed sheets to sun and air kills the dust mites and bed bugs. Making your bed immediately just seals them into a sweaty, dark, environment to feed on the dead skin cells you shed at night. Super gross, which is why this is super smart. I open a bunch of windows in the morning, even in winter, but my window sills, erm, aren't clean enough to be hanging my sheets out (Who cleans their window sills??)...so I just let in a lot of light and maybe get around to pulling the covers up sometime in the afternoon. I don't.

2) We hang our laundry (usually).

Germans don't have dryers. Just a washer in the kitchen or basement. Its not that they can't afford them, its just not the norm, because...why? Why pay for something the sun and wind will do for free? Most people have sturdy permanent lines set up in their yard. We just have this portable one right now. We have a dryer but I think line drying is a good idea and that I should always do it. Can you cut yourself on our rock-hard towels? Absolutely! But who couldn't use a little extra exfoliation? No HOA is going to tell them to take down the line immediately because it's "ruining" the neighborhood. Its totally normal and I really like that. Sometimes we do use the dryer like when it's raining, but if I wanted to really be hardcore I would just hang the clothes inside. I should do that...



3) I bought Birkenstocks.

I know. Hideous.

But they are sooooo comfortable. Germans wear house shoes indoors. Maybe its a soft slipper but its more likely a hard-soled shoe that is only worn inside. I've always thought Birkenstocks were so ugly, rivaled only by the Croc, which (cough) I own (cough) as well. (Except when we lived in Amsterdam that one summer all the trendy 20-somethings were wearing a certain style of Birkenstock. So there.) I need serious arch support so I figured I should try the official shoe of Germany and these babies provided. They're the first things I put on and the last things I take off and I can no longer walk anywhere in my house without them. And it never hurts when I stub my toe, which seems to happen a lot. Hippies, naturalists, the cool Dutch kids, and the Germans were right all along.



4) We don't refrigerate our eggs.

Just sitting there out in the open.

Ok, I admit I just recently started doing this because it felt weird to me and still does a little. But I buy them off the shelf at our little vegetable market so what difference does it make to refrigerate them if I go back and buy more of the same eggs two days later? They don't need to be refrigerated because they come straight from the chicken rather than being processed. In the US eggs must be chilled because they are shampooed, removing the natural protective coating that keeps bacteria out. No shampoo, no need to chill. I just rinse them off before we use them and we go through a lot so they don't sit there long even though the shelf life is many, many weeks.



5) German Dinner

I blogged about this here a few weeks ago. We don't have this every night but probably three or four nights a week. It's my fave.



All of that said, these things are definitely not unique to Germans or anything really extraordinary. They're just not the norm in America which is why they're unique to me. Eggs are not refrigerated in Korea or most countries for that matter. And most of the world doesn't use dryers. I like these ways and I hope to discover more to adopt. Among other things, one of the benefits of a multi-culturally influenced life is taking a little of this and a little of that from the rest of the world.