Stefan and I were out walking the dog yesterday evening and one of the locals from town rode up on his bicycle behind us. The two of us were talking and didn’t hear him come up behind us…and we were walking side-by-side with the dog taking up the rest of the small street. It’s basically a one-lane farm road that we walk her along although it is still open to regular traffic. But the road doesn’t really go anywhere that most people would want to go to, so it’s usually not too heavily traveled.

When I finally noticed him behind us (no idea how long he might have been there although I do imagine he would have said something if it had been a while), we moved over to let him pass. He’s an older gentleman and I guess he is probably in his 70’s. I see him quite a bit when I’m walking Ayla in the mornings…and we have seen him going into his house while picking up Thai food in the evening so we know he lives on the main street as well, but more in the main shopping district than we are.

To our surprise, instead of passing by us, the guy stopped to talk. He was sort of scolding us for taking up the whole road and remarked that in his day, he would never have been able to walk the dog at the same time as his wife, especially at 7pm when the sun was still up, because there would have been far too much work to do. He was telling us that he could remember being 18 and already having a job, earning next to nothing and paying 40 Deutsche Marks (DM) a month for rent! That’s about 20 euros a month for rent – and you cannot even find parking for a fee like that in Frankfurt now. He then remarked that he used to spend 6 Pfennigs (3 euro cents) for a roll which now costs 45 euro cents. Naturally inflation plays some part in all this but even when we switched to the Euro here several years ago, the price was supposed to be halved in numerical terms. The Euro was worth 2 DM. So if something cost 1 DM it should have cost 50 Euro cents. But in many cases, it became 1 Euro. Talk about price hikes.

It was pretty fascinating to talk to this guy…well listen to him. He’s generally quite nice and always makes a point of saying hello. Just thinking about everything he’s seen and lived through…and then we started to wonder just how long he’s lived in our town and how much history he must know about our house! There’s something to be said for becoming friends with the old-timers.

And then we started to realize that in our town of approximately 2200 people, we now know at least 11 families. That is more than we knew in our old neighborhood and we lived there for over a year and a half! Perhaps it’s the big nutty dog we walk all the time…or maybe it’s the fact that we bought one of the nicest houses in town and the people are starting to notice who we are and recognize the fact that we aren’t going to destroy the place like our neighbors have unfortunately done. But whatever the case is, we are definitely enjoying our home and our little village here.