Let there be light

I stand corrected. A blog entry or two ago I was talking about how much gas was on the Germany economy. I said that it was $2.33 a gallon on base and about 2.30 Euros per liter. That’s pretty high, however, reality isn’t much better. It’s really 1.27 Euro per liter for the “Super Blei Frei” (pronounced Super Bly fry-I love saying that. Doesn’t it sound funny? It means Super unleaded). This would be about 4.81 Euros a gallon, which is around $6.60 a gallon with the exchange rate. We think our taxes are bad. My wonder everyone drives Smart Cars and Minis.

I also made a big deal about this automatic DVD dispensing/rental system that I recently discovered here. My mother just informed me that you can rent DVD’s at Stop and Shop using a machine and it’s pretty cheap there too. Just goes to show that I’m out of the loop. I’ve been living in Germany for three years and I guess I’ve missed a lot. My bad.

Anywho, I wanted to write about why I didn’t have an entry for yesterday. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, so I figured I’d be up in the middle of the night at some point, so I’d save it until then. Well, around 11:00 pm last night I got up at sat down to write. Since my PC is excruciatingly slow these days, it took several minutes to start up and log on. Suddenly everything shut off and the lights went out. Super. Thank God I hadn’t spent an hour writing, I would have been quite upset. I thought maybe I flipped a breaker or something, which happens often in this old house. Then again, it seemed really dark. I looked outside and saw lights on at the town hall, but all the street lights were out as well as the lights at the hotel across the street. I started fumbling around in the dark to find a candle so I could investigate further without killing myself. Didn’t flip a breaker, so I figured it was something else.

Then I started thinking about hot water and getting ready for work the next day. I could shower at the gym on the base, but I hate doing that. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I didn’t shower, but still….I purposely left the light switch in the on position in the kitchen so I would know when the power came back on. Luckily it came on about an hour later.

This experience brought to light (no pun intended) a few thoughts. I didn’t know what to do. Back home in CT I would be immediately on the phone to CL & P or NDPU (whoever we pay for our power these days) to report the power loss, but here? I didn’t know what the norm is. I suppose if it was 10 degrees out, I would have either called the landlord or dug through my files to find a number of the power company, but it’s spring-like weather out now, so there wasn’t a great sense of urgency. I also figured that surely a hotel would call someone about it, however, I realized that I wasn’t prepared. If I managed to find a number, would it be the right one (my bills are in German) and when I got someone on the phone, would I be able to convey my plight and would they understand me? It made me realize that however settled and comfortable we finally are here in Germany, we still face challenges. Another example of the many things we for granted.