Hauswirtschaftsleiterin

You can stand in one place and see four Apotheke.

Drug stores in the States, such as Rite Aid, Duane Reade, or CVS, are divided into sections. You can buy prescription drugs from the pharmacist in the back, aspirin from the shelves in the middle, or a beach ball and makeup from the front. The basic idea here is presumably that medicines like aspirin can be adequately handed by a normal person, without the supervision of a pharmacist. I have grown up with this assumption, so of course it seems natural.

But Germans feel different. The stores that most closely resemble American drug stores only sell the drugs that can’t possibly harm you; deodorant, shampoo, vitamins, makeup, and beach balls. Everything else, including minor pain medication, is retrieved over-the-counter from an Apotheke. Now keep in mind that “over-the-counter” does not mean “you can go pick up a bottle from a shelf”. Instead, it means “you have to ask for it from a person who stands behind a counter”. To add insult to inconvenience, headache medicines come in packs of 12 or so, in individually wrapped sleeves. Much like our expensive allergy medication might come in. And the person behind the counter will inform you of the proper way to medicate yourself.

And I’m not sure why there are so many of them, but every city center area contains more Apotheke than Duane Reade has locations in New York. And you can only buy drugs and exotic cosmetics from Apotheke! Are Germans really that into hard drugs and cosmetics?

The first time I walked around Degerloch, I saw gumball machines mounted to gates and walls throughout the town. And while some were in disrepair (or at least old), the gum inside seemed fine. Some of them had toys, no different than the kind of awesome junk you’d get in the US.

A small child selects her favorite gum

I was fully prepared to accept this as a strange thing about Degerloch, but we found one in Zuffenhausen while we were apartment shopping up north.

I guess the only odd thing about having gumball machines scattered throughout the city, is that they’re mounted to what appear to be private fences. In the States, they’d be generally mounted to metal pipes and placed in front of stores.

Anyway, the gum was typical. We spit it out as soon as we had the chance.

We walked to the top of the hill this weekend, and ran into a gigantic maypole.

Stuttgart Maypole

They say there are normally celebrations on the first day of May, to raise the maypole, but we somehow completely missed them. This isn’t too far away from our temporary apartment, so I’m not sure when the celebrations would have happened. It’s a pretty neat thing to see, though. I haven’t figured out what all those flags mean.

It kinda looks like they found a huge tree, and stripped all the branches south of the top 12 feet.

There’s an unusual train in Stuttgart, that goes through Degerloch on it’s way up the hill. The hill is so steep, simple moving wheels would slip too much, and the train would never get up the hill. To solve this problem (apparently back in the late 1800’s), they used a gigantic rack.

Zahnradbahn Rack

Pretty neat.

It's not good.

It may be time to buy some kind of ground-coffee-making device.