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Settled into Normal
Life
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Settled into Normal
Life
Oct 26, 2002
Dear Friends and Families,
So, now that we've settled, what's life like here in Frankfurt? How do we spend our time?
Home life has settled down, now that we now longer need to shop for- and construct - furniture. That's something I do not look forward to when we inevitably move on again. Now we have time to visit with neighbors. Our building has just four apartments and everyone speaks English! In the other half of the building are a Danish couple with little twin girls and Kurdish couple with a young daughter as well. This sort of mixture is not too unusual in Frankfurt where a quarter of the population is foreigners.
Our neighborhood is called Sachsenhausen and it's one of the oldest in town. Most of Frankfurt was bombed flat in the war but our building, like several in this neighborhood, survived. There are dozens of bars and restaurants here and a good selection of stores too, but, like many places around Frankfurt, there is plenty of green.
I work a pretty regular weekly schedule. This job was initially described as "part-time" but it's developed into a full 40-hour-per-week assignment. How long it will last is always in question, but that's a story for another day.
My company, Framatome ANP, is a product of the downsizing and survival-of-the-fittest history of commercial nuclear power. Framatome was the designer of plants in France and they purchased "Siemens/KWU", the designer of most plants in Germany. They also purchased the reactor-design operations of Babcock & Wilcox in the States so we've ended up with a three-nation operation, reporting to Paris. I belong to the American part and I'm here in Germany because we are interested in bringing a German design into the U.S. for possible use a decade or more from now.
Most days, I just jump on a tram for the 20-minute ride out to the office in the neighboring city of Offenbach. At that point, I do what most people do nowadays, sit at a desk, look at a computer screen, type some things back to the machine and occasionally wander off to a meeting. Sometimes we meet with real people and sometimes with video images of people.
A couple of times a month, folks come over from the U.S. to understand what our German colleagues have been working on. The best part of these visits may be when Marianne and I get to show our visitors just what Germans have been eating when they are not working. Sachsenhausen is famous for restaurants serving traditional food, so it's a must to have at least one meal of schnitzel, liver dumplings, sauerkraut and, most important, jugs of apple wine. This last is an acquired taste but, with practice, we may be doing just that.
Marianne is still having trouble getting a full-time job. At first, the prospects of a job at the U.S. Air Force base school looked very promising. They had an opening for a GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) coordinator and Marianne has worked in that specialty for many of the 30+years of her teaching career. The problem arose when the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) noticed that, while she had been doing the job for years, she did not have the proper specialist credential. In the DoDDS world, credentials out-weigh performance so it seems we're back to zero.
Actually, this has been a mixed blessing. It's allowed us to settle in much more efficiently and it has allowed us to travel a bit. Now, Marianne is suffering from a medical condition called "frozen shoulder", and that has rendered her right arm very painful and almost useless. Working may not be an option until the problem goes away. The local doctor has assured her that the condition is temporary and should go away within six months to a year.
Meanwhile, we are trying yet again to learn a foreign language. I've already completed one eight-week, three-evenings-a-week Introductory German course. It's been fun because the group is a fun and interesting mix of people and countries. No two are the same nationality so we all learn about the world as we struggle to say, in German, "My name is ....." or "I am from ...." or "I am in Frankfurt because ...". Next Monday, I start my second course and Marianne starts one too. Despite the late start, she gets to start a notch or two above me since she has studied the language before. It will be fun if we can both handle the language, although in Frankfurt at least, English is surprisingly common.
On the family front, we've had some visitors and developments. First, Gabby came to visit and mother-daughter meetings at the airport always bring smiles. The September visit was early enough that we still had good weather and we enjoyed seeing the sights, including sampling the late summer wine-tasting booths set up around town.
Gabby's boyfriend Jeremy came up from Spain. He'd been in Madrid improving his Spanish before some unidentified travelers' illness cut short his studies. They were both great visitors and enjoyed our new hometown. They also went off to Poland and the Czech Republic in search of more history (and privacy?) before they had to return, too soon, to California.
Marianne's cousin Klara and husband Gabor also swung by for a quick visit. They had driven from Budapest and were headed for Belgium where Gabor was taking an examination in computer networking. They are our closest relatives by a few thousand kilometers and it was good to pay back one meal for all those we've had at their home over the last few years.
I've made a couple of trips back to the Lynchburg Virginia offices of my company and those trips allow detours to see my sister Bim and her husband Ron and son Mike. Mike fixes helicopters in the U.S. Marines and we all worry about him being reassigned from North Carolina to somewhere more dangerous. Meanwhile, his mom and dad cope with their cancers and continue to give us inspiration for resolving our small problems.
Speaking of small problems, the trips also allow me to visit Geoff. Just kidding. He is neither small nor a problem. (In fact, I can remember him small, but never as a problem. This may be the result of parental memory loss but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.) He's still working on his PhD research project, something to do with "condensed matter Physics", whatever that is. His fiancée Suzanne is also working her way through graduate school but they look forward to a real life after student poverty, in another year or two.
Last but not least, we are grandparents. Last Wednesday, Jen gave birth to Richard Patrick in Boulder Community Hospital. Mother and son are doing fine although the two-week-overdue, 36-hour-labor baby had been in no hurry. Father Brian also seems to be doing OK with just a bit of sleep loss so far. He does understand that's just the beginning.
All in all, our Frankfurt time is flying past. The standard expatriot advice describes a three-phase adaptation: honeymoon, depression, and real appreciation. In Kyiv, we certainly saw that pattern with our first winter bringing us to the lowest part of the second step. Here in Germany, I suppose we're still in Phase 1 or, looking at the grey, rainy day outside, at the juncture between Phases 1 and 2. However, we look forward to the third phase and, knowing that's the goal, can make any homesickness pass more quickly.
Besides, it would be impossible for us to cure our homesickness. We really have no single place to call home anymore. Our only real estate is in Kyiv. Our children and grandchild are spread in three U.S. states, our other relatives in those and a few more. We now have many friends we'd like to call and invite home for dinner, but we have to make do with emails from addresses ending in ".au", ".ua", ".ru", ".hu", ".kg", ".bf", ".fr", ".br", ".de", ".se", ".my" and, of course, those old favorites: ".com" and ".net". I guess Frankfurt IS home, as much as almost anywhere else might be.
Take care. Drop by if you have the chance.
John and Marianne
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Created October 27,
2002
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