This morning, I had my first opportunity to talk with our neighbor who lives right next to us in the timber-frame house which has basically been condemned by the historical society. Well actually, they don’t live in the house (since from the looks of things it is only full of scrap wood and otherwise unfinished) but they seem to live in one of the other buildings on the property and run some sort of business from there that has to do with doors or windows or something along those lines…as far as we can tell. Basically what happened on their house (from what we’ve been told by locals) is that they wanted to build some new structure on the house, basically a small, covered balcony for upstairs which would be a covered entrance to the house downstairs, but the house is under “denkmalschutz” (historical protection) and because the structure wasn’t there originally and they didn’t get approval to put it on there, they had to stop construction altogether until they remove what shouldn’t be there. They also put in plastic frame windows which isn’t allowed either….and those are just the things we actually know about. Oopsie.

Apparently this happened several years ago and they either ran out of money or just stopped caring so the house has just been sitting there. The permit on their front window is several years old and they don’t seem to have any plans to start things up again. Thankfully the side of the house that faces us is still nicely painted and you really can’t tell all that much from our side or the street…but we know it’s fishy and would of course love for the house to be renovated at some point since it would only mean good things for our block.

Anyway, I don’t know if this neighbor actually owns the house or what but he’s always very nice on the rare occasions that we see each other. When there was snow on the ground a month ago, the neighbor was outside sweeping his sidewalk also and he indicated that we shouldn’t go overboard with the sweeping. Apparently the PO would clear the bare minimum and that would be that. Since we have the corner lot, we have a lot of sidewalk to clear (you are responsible for the sidewalk outside your house if it snows…because if someone should fall you can be sued…makes sense since it’s government property, right?).

So this morning, I was putting out the trash bin (the correct one for a change) and the neighbor was in his truck and getting ready to pull out into the street. He started yelling over to me but since the garbage men were actually in the alley next to our house and there was some traffic, I couldn’t really hear him. So he got out of his truck and I walked over in his direction so he could tell me that I should turn the trash bin in the other direction with the handles pointing inside…because the garbage trucks pick them up automatically with their little arm. I actually watched this taking place and I have to say it’s really quite ingenious…and wonderful for those poor garbage collectors who before had to actually do work and now just need to push a button.

Now this may seem like a small thing to you that our neighbor went to the effort to pass on that nugget of knowledge…and perhaps it would be in some other places…but in general, the people around Frankfurt are not all that friendly. It’s a working city and the people commute in, do their job and go home…to repeat it all tomorrow. It gets to be routine and you ignore the other people you come into contact with because they just tend to be annoying anyway. But here in our little village it would seem that at least two of our immediate neighbors have started to accept us…and they will be rewarded with invitations to our house warming party whenever we finally have that (after painting the outside and about a million other projects take place). The other people living around us will not be so lucky, especially the old woman who always glares at us…unless the dog is near and then she stays as far away as possible. So it goes 🙂