Bann

When I was 14-15 we lived in Bann, Germany. It was a little village that was close to Landstuhl Air Force Base, where my younger sister went to school, and Ramstein Air Force Base where I went to school. My poor older sister was too young to go to college but had already graduated from high school so she spent that year making Christmas stockings and communing with our poodle.
Anyway,
When we got to Germany I hated it. HATED it with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. It was overcast all the time and, of course, none of us spoke a lick of German. I couldn't have cared less that it was my dad's dream job; I just wanted to go home. (I was a selfish little twit. But most 14 year olds are, right?)
But after about three months or so, once school started and I made some friends it didn't seem so bad anymore. I actually kind of grew to like it. Don't get me wrong, when I heard we were leaving I was ecstatic. But I wouldn't have minded staying for a little longer.
So I decided that today I would write down some of the things I remember about Germany. (The good ones. Bad memories, or at least MY bad memories, do not belong on the Internet.) It's been almost 14 years since we got there, which seems like FOREVER ago and I don't really want to forget everything that happened to me there. So here goes.
1. We lived in a tri-colored house that was built in 1923. The basement was just FULL of these weird spiders with super long legs that were just disgusting and it totally smelled like mildew. And when you went from the garage to the place where the washing machine and dryer were you had to duck to avoid hitting your head on the concrete lintel. My dad and I both forgot that exactly once. The rest of the family is short enough that they didn't have to worry about it. The rooms upstairs were arranged in a way where you had to go through someone's bedroom to get to someone else's. I had to go through my little sister's to get to mine. Sometimes this was fine. Other times this was NOT fine. My parent's bedroom had this huge mural of a forest along one wall. And we had two bathrooms but only one of them had a shower and a tub. And they were totally 60's yellow. Everything in the house was in the 60's and 70's color scheme. Even these awful brown curtains that were up when we got there. Each room had a radiator for heat but the oil was so expensive that my dad was really "careful" about the amount of time we turned them on. Since all of our electronics were American we had to use these super heavy transformers to plug things in. And in the upstairs game room every time you turned on the television, which we only used for movies or Nintendo, it blew the fuse for the whole upstairs and we had to go trip the circuit breaker. The downstairs tv only got British cable and it didn't actually work very well so we hardly ever watched it. There was an attic upstairs that had this huge reddish stain on the floor and we (well, I, at least) were positive someone had been murdered up there in a vast Nazi conspiracy. We had no garbage disposal so everything had to be composted in this crate thing that stood outside by a cherry tree that grew in our backyard. The cherries were surprisingly good. The landlord also owned a little gas station down the street so we would go down and buy chocolate and Coke from him and sometimes he'd give it to us for free. When he needed to talk to us he'd send his son down to either try to talk to us in English (which wasn't great) or talk to my mom in French.

You know, it occurs to me that this could be a very long blog posting. So instead of just sitting here and droning on about my life in Germany I'll just leave it at that for today. Maybe on days where I've come up dry for something to write about I'll jot down a few more notes about other things I remember.
Grand?
I thought you'd think so.
Until tomorrow!