The recycling necessity

International air travel does not respect the need to carry your own house with you when you move to another, completely alien city. Thus meeting economics in its rugged simplicity - the limited resources problem.

We traveled here with a completely inadequate stock of toys for the kiddo and now getting through the day with the same old, boring few is very hard. I am continuously scouting for durable, relatively low cost toys (don't want to pour all of the mister's salary into toys now, do we?). In the longer term I hope to build a good collection for her, to suit different play moods, weathers, etc. etc. In the short term, we have admittedly a problem on hand. The idea of toys from recycled toys was born out of this necessity and has almost possessed me. (I think I may start looking at items in the grocery stores with this lens soon enough - carton just right for train wagon, purchase, check check!)

Anyway we started with a milk carton ship. A simple cut here and there on the carton, a straw sail and we were ready to cruise to the local playgroup on the Monday morning - the theme for the week was ships! I don't think I have a picture of this ship; basically it sank pretty soon. Blame the architect!

Another hit was bowling pins - from flavored milk bottles. We got a ball two days ago and haven't looked back since.

This morning, we used a cardboard box to keep us busy for a whole two hours and come up with this tunnel-cum-road-cum-activity box. We have our panda-on-wheels, our excavator and our newly acquired porsche (from the said museum) to race through the tracks we painstakingly created.

On ventilator support

It has been an excruciating week this - hot and humid beyond all imagination. We had a romantic idea of the European summer - sunny days, short clothes, et al. This isn't quite the stuff of our dreams. We spent day one and the following night in denial but soon realized what we had to do - buy a fan - and it seemed simple enough really - get to the nearest technology/appliances shop and hand over the moolah to the person behind the check out desk. Alles Gute?

Nope, Nein. Living in a Utopia, were we? This is what really transpired:
We enter the shop and stare at the menu of items floor by floor. Where does the damn thing fit? There is no such category as household appliances. You could have computer + office (check - no fan there); household + kitchen + lighting (nope); small appliances (no luck again)... well we had to find it if it was there, right? It was in "Bathroom and Health products".. Eh?

After spending 10 minutes figuring out which section the fan was to be sorted into, we learn that it is out of stock. No table fan, pedestal fan, no USB fan, not even those tiny battery operated ones. New stocks to be available in 2-3 days. Bookings are not accepted.
We went to three other shops, fortunately decided to just ask the man behind the counter as we entered the shop. Got the same reply everywhere!
We felt like fools, really. And were almost getting looked at like fools too. As if we had woken up so late it was already too late. "What did you expect to hear?" kind of expressions on the faces of salesmen.
Uh oh!

We came home disappointing, the frightening prospect of another hot and sultry night ahead of us. Decided to check on amazon and learnt that fans are called "Ventilators" in German. Well, that explains a lot somehow! Amazon to the rescue it is, then!

This is one of the most advanced nations in the world - surely they don't need lessons on how to seek a steaming hot business opportunity, pun intended? Back in India, I remember we bought ACs not once but twice in April, when temperatures start to soar and most people would choose to invest in an AC. April is also the month when you will see the maximum number of models of ACs in the market, the best stocks and mostly reliable customer service. Both our ACs were up and running in a matter of hours after we decided to buy them. Oh how I miss that opportunism!

My sister summed it up in the best words possible - if fans were so direly needed, they would by now have been sold on traffic lights if we had been in India!

Raising a kid - never you mind!

The term "kid-friendly" has got a whole new meaning in my dictionary since I arrived in Germany. Before this I thought of kid friendly as a place accessible with a stroller, having clean toilets and perhaps even a mother-care room, at best a high-chair in a restaurant. I think I would have been happy with these had I not come to Germany.

Not anymore. In the first month, we consciously avoided public places. We struck off museums from our  must-see list since were totally unsure how the kiddo would react in a place like that. Entry tickets are not exactly cheap, which means walking away in case of a meltdown would pinch hard. Slowly we started to realize that people with families, even infants were omnipresent. As we explored the town further, we saw parks, demarcated play areas and child-friendly facilities just about everywhere we went. The central shopping street has a ride or two each block. Book shops have a kids-area to allow you to browse in peace, eateries have a kids-area, trains have areas marked out for strollers. I'm sure there is lots that I haven't even discovered yet.

Subsequently we have became more relaxed about taking our kid out - whether it is eating out, shopping, site-seeing or plain travelling, you can be sure that there will be something or the other to engage your child.

We decided to risk it at the Natural History Museum after reading reviews that indicated that our kiddo could enjoy it too. She totally digged it. The exhibits (not the history) was life-like, colorful, caught her fancy in the strangest ways. We naturally had a great time together. Kid-friendly in a never-before way!

Ludwigsburg was particularly marvelous. The Marchengartens is a incredible children's park with all sorts of rides, dramatized fairy tales, even a water-play area. I would not in my wildest dreams have imagined a castle concealing a children's play area that size.

May be there are still places where I can't expect to visit with my kid - like the theater or a serious museum of art. But on the whole, I am unlikely to miss out on most aspects of life just because I have a kid in tow.

Why should having a baby put you in the back-seat in life? This society has acknowledged and internalized the challenge that is part of raising a child in such a beautiful manner. I'm really surprised that economics should come in the way of enjoying parenthood with so much to enjoy about it around!