More Germany stuff

Some more things about Germany...

• Laundry.  

Oh, boy.  Most people don't have dryers, they still hang dry their clothes.  Also, many apartments have community laundry rooms.  So you own your own washing machine (the capacity of which is much smaller than the average American washer) and put it in the community laundry room.  Then you hang dry your items on a rack in the community laundry room.  Luckily, our washing machine was in our storage unit next to the community laundry room and we bought a dryer (no hook-up required, it plugs in and the water collects in a tray you have to dump out after every load) because let's be honest, hang drying garments in the community laundry room wasn't going to fly for us.  And if you hang dry things in your apartment in the winter your whole house is moist forever because German apartments are so well built / insulated that there is no air circulation at all.  And who wants to wait 24 hours for one load of laundry to be done?!

But doing laundry in Germany isn't fast anyway.  A wash cycle takes two hours and a dry cycle takes two hours.  And we couldn't run the washer and dryer at the same time.  And since the washer and dryer were in the basement and we lived on the fourth floor I couldn't always get down to rotate them right when they finished because sometimes Pippa would be napping and I couldn't leave her alone.  What this amounts to is that on a very good day I could get two loads of laundry done.  I absolutely do NOT miss doing laundry in Germany.  As a side note, some people owned machines that were washers and dryers all in one.  They still had a really small capacity and still took really long to do a full cycle.

• Appliances are smaller.  I've already covered washing machines.  A normal German oven could barely, if at all, fit a full size Thanksgiving turkey.  A German fridge / freezer combo is what you would normally see in a USA hotel room.  The dishwashers are also significantly smaller.  T and I used to joke that Germany is a country built for dwarves.  
• Buying items in bulk is not a thing in Germany.  They don't even sell gallons of milk (only 1.5 liters) much less have bulk stores like Costco.  It's kind of surprising because Germany is super into recycling so you would think they would have bulk items to cut down on the amount of original packaging but they are more into super fresh food.  Most German recycling seems to be post-consumer not pre-consumer.  I actually think we had MORE trash in Germany than we do in the USA because nothing comes in family sized packs.  
• The pizza in Germany is terrible.  And we tried a lot of pizza there.  The basic problem is that it's mostly crust.  But not even fluffy crust, just flat boring crust.  There's almost no sauce and no cheese.  We did go to a Pizza Hut in Munich once and they did have regular (American style) pizza.  
• Germany has some really good pastries.  Like really good.  The best pastry I have ever had in my life came from Munich.  Sadly it was on like our 5th day in Munich in a far part of town that we never visited again and I didn't pay attention to what it was called.  But it was SO good!
• No food items have ziplock packaging.  Like shredded cheese, you just cut the bag open and it stays open.  The same with frozen fruit and everything else you wish came with a ziplock built in.  Also, you can't readily find regular ziplock bags.  It's all twisty tie.  
• Hot dog and hamburger buns do not come pre-sliced.  I know, a small thing, but definitely something we noticed.