Today was an ideal day to start preparing for Christmas, Danielle was at work and I didn’t had to go to work because of All Saints’ Day. This is a regional public holiday in Germany. So that means time to set up our Christmas-tree! You might think we are crazy (maybe we are) but it’s a lot of work to set up the tree and we want to enjoy it longer as just a couple of weekends. It’s still the same artificial tree we have as last year. Some facts about our tree:

• 2,15 meter high
• 1,35 in diameter (at the widest point)
• 800 Warm white lights
• 5 White Garlands
• 100+ White, Silver and Transparent Ornaments (Apples, Roses, Angels, Butterflies, Grapes, Glass Bauble and more)
• 1 White tree skirt

I started this morning at about 11 o’clock. And than I figured out the I had a big problem, last year I dismantled the tree faster than ever and now I know why, the light strings where all knotty. So it took me almost an hour to get this far:

And about 2 hours later the tree was setup and all of the 800 lights were lit:

And 20 minutes later I had the Garlands in place:

Then it was tim to get all the ornaments together since it’s best to have an overview before starting with putting them in the tree. I mean we want to have the nicest ornaments on the parts of the tree we see most of the time. And we also want to divide them equally around the tree. It took almost 2 hours before I had all the ornaments in the tree. I didn’t count them but there are definitely more than 100 ornaments.

And finally we had a Christmas-tree again:

And some close-ups of the ornaments:

The title of this blog post I got from the newspaper article I write about and is not my own opinion about the Germans.

today we had a nice get-together with colleagues and there I got a newspaper article from my boss. The article came from a German newspaper and describes that it is possible to get trained in working together with Germans,  the title of this message is the first sentence of this article. And it’s  quite funny to read being Dutch and living in Germany.

The article is available above and is  written in German but I’ve translated the first part which is also the most interesting. Right-click and select open in new window/tab would open in it a size which is readable.

Germans are terribly complicated: They address each other formally, still wear ties and want to have everything in written form. More than rarely the Dutch have issues with this. To make sure the Dutch won’t be disappointed they can follow a course in German etiquette.

And to be honest I can understand that this course exists for the same reason as other intercultural trainings. After we just came to German I really need to get used to the formal way of speaking with each other, the hierarchy and the expectation of having every statement in a written form. After 4 years I think I got used to it and see it as normal and I can say it something Germany should be proud of its part of the German culture.