Keeping occupied

So, this time last year, Lady Kirsten and I decided to go house-hunting. We wanted to stay in the area but I wanted an easier ride to work in the morning. In Wiltingen, it took me 90 minutes to get to work and 2 hours to come home, which i didn't mind, considering I don't go every day and we lived in a water mill in the middle of some stunning countryside. Moving was always going to be hard, considering the nature of the place we lived in, so wherever we went would really have to be tip-top.
We didn't have long to wait. I ran a search on the main property website for the area, and found an absolute beauty in Saarburg. It was the very first place we viewed in the late autumn and we would compare it against any other property we looked at thereafter.

It was on a fairly steep incline, but the views over the valley and surrounding hills was memorable, and the roofed terrace (seen above on the right of the house) was perfect to survey the natural landscape all around.

The downside was that even though it bordered on the forest, there were some busy roads nearby, including a spaghetti-style slip-road system that is soon to be adapted, and the planned building of a supermarket only a minute away, with all the palaver of construction and destruction. However, the bus to Luxembourg leaves from only 200 metres from the front door.

The most poignant thing about the house was that it had a certain dignified air, as if to say "like me or loathe me, this is what you get". And considering its most advantageous selling price, there were no major renovation issues, which baffled me and still leaves me wondering why, come the following spring, it was still on the market. Looking at other houses of various shapes and sizes in the meantime, nothing compared to that one, and so we put in a bid for it. It was the best decision we made.

On the top floor are four light and spacious bedrooms, a bathroom and a hallway, on the upper ground floor is a huge kitchen, a large dining room, a living room and a smaller room doing nothing, so we converted it into a library. The ground floor is a second residence, which helps to pay a large chunk of our mortgage, and behind that, built into the land, is a cellar large enough to use it for washing clothes, storing a huge amount of boxes and housing the gardening equipment until I built a garden shed.

The roofed terrace is a delightful place to sit and we decked it out with hanging baskets filled with long-lasting plants. We added some further plants and even tomatoes and peppers, which produced a small but rewarding yield in September. The main work was in the garden and upper meadow, where there is a huge empty space, just waiting to be landscaped. This will not happen overnight, but I wanted to get things going this summer and I built a shed (as I mentioned), although not one of those you hammer the panels together, like there is already in the garden (see photo below), but rather a cabin-style shed where you bang in the planks so they overlap. It may take longer, but it is a satisfactory feeling to know you built it yourself. I had to shift a lot of earth, as the incline of the hill would have not been a wise place to build foundations. With that soil, I made a heather rockery and kitchen garden.

We hope to stay here for many years.

Uphill:

A balloon passes overhead. Our nut trees (right of photo) provided the local deer with a huge Sunday breakfast one morning in October.

Building a garden shed:
Lady Kirsten deciphering the instructions for putting on the roof. The hardest part about building the shed was shifting the soil beneath to level off the ground. I filled the hole with fine gravel to keep it dry.

Taking a short break:

Me, discussing a shisha break with Iman, our renter. As an Iranian descendent, he has access to some of the finest flavoured shisha tobaccoes in Germany.

The completed shed:

Roof on, wood stained and heather rockery planted, I built a bird house with the remaining pieces of plank. It has become a focal point of our cats' entertainment. I still need to affix the guttering to the shed and place the blue barrels below to provide water for the plants come the spring.

Old and new:

The old shed will be sawn up and used to heat us up in midwinter. In its place will come a pergola and seating area for us to relax with a good book, some cheese, wine and bread. The grass area between the heather rockery and the wheel barrow will become a terrace next year.

Deer in the garden:
We are frequently visited by all sorts of wild animals, including a trio of deer one Sunday morning. I spent about 45 minutes admiring them in our and next door's gardens, munching on the grass. My admiration turned a little sour when I went outside later on in the day and found they had eaten literally every living and growing thing in the garden. They were great substitutes for my hedge trimmers but they could have stopped when they got to the worcesterberry, raspberry and blackberry plants...
Still, it has solved one problem for me: I know what I'll be cooking for dinner on 25th December now.

The bus is a very good advert for the car

Honestly. You try your whole life conscientiously avoiding learning to drive, to the extent that people think you're poor, that in the end you start questioning if it is worth it...

When Lady Kirsten and I lived in Leuven, public transport was pretty OK. Not ideal, and often late, Belgian buses were often the only effective way of moving around the city. The trains are also pretty comfortable, although unreliable.

In our corner of Germany, I must say, the trains will work almost to the second, even in the coldest of snowy winters to the extent that you dare not be late. My criticism of them though is a valid one. They are not very frequent. Punctual, but rare. Efficient, but scarce. Clean, fast, even cheap. But if you miss one, it would be quicker to go back to your house and fetch your bicycle.

When we moved to Saarburg, it was great, because I could step outside, walk 200 metres (not even that) and jump on the bus straight to Luxembourg. It drops me about 5 minutes from the European Court of Justice and the Jean Monnet Commission building, two of the buildings I work in, although if I need to go to the European Parliament or Commission training building, I still have to get another bus. And it is this bus where the problems start. The people hanging out at bus stops have little or no sense of community spirit. They will get on the bus before everyone has got off and make sure they get the best seats. These buses are virtually empty and yet they are acting like it's the last bus from Armageddon.

The worst thing in Luxembourg is that many bus lines are so frequent that there might be another one right behind, similarly empty. Luxembourg's bus travellers don't acknowledge that probability though, and often make the experience so unattractive that you imagine you'd like to be sitting in the passenger seat of a ripoff taxi, which is the norm in Luxembourg. Although this is not the case every time.

But the bus taking me from Saarburg to Luxembourg is not squalid. Quite the opposite, but here lies a further, paradoxical complication. It is a luxury coach, with one of the most scenic routes in the world. It starts off in the Saar Valley where we are, rising up the steep forested hills to the open moors which separate the Saar from the Mosel, taking in the windswept beauty of the countryside around Merzkirchen before we plummet into the Mosel valley, crossing the frontier in some exquisite vineyard country, then rising up to meet the motorway into Kirchberg and Luxembourg City.

However, there are a few difficulties here, namely one of the drivers. He seems to think that everyone is an abstract object. When I tell him which stop I wish to get off at, he looks at me as if I have just said something philosophical and incomprehensible. When passengers buy their monthly ticket, he just takes our money and says nothing before handing it over, as though we are not interactive instruments capable of communicating on his wavelength. He does little to make us happy and you can never rely on him for a favour. I get on the bus at its second stop.

But there is an even more pressing problem here: the passengers. The vast majority are OK, but I sense that as they are from the country, they are not used to strangers taking their bus. So it came as a shock when I got on the bus and had the audacity to ask the woman who always sits at the front if she could move her light work bag for me to sit down. She huffed and puffed before mumbling something incomprehensible and thrusting her bag on the floor. I mean, she doesn't have a rental contract on that particular double-seat, and I need it more than her - she's so small, she could easily sit further back. Needless to say, she has not said a word to me since. There is a guy with extra long legs who deserves it much more than she does. Furthermore, that place is one of only three spots on the bus where I can put my work bag with all my books in it without taking up a seat which another passenger might need - it has extra room for luggage. One of the other two, just behind the middle door, is occupied by an enormous woman who needs two spaces anyway, and the last place is at the back where there is no light to read my book.

Opposite her, behind the driver, there is a further possibility, but the guy with long legs sits there when this other woman I mentioned steals his spot. The 157 bus from Saarburg to Luxembourg is full of little political quirks like this. My theory is these people are middle-class, and want to feel rewarded for leaving their cars at home. They feel they are owed a prize for being so green. The woman at the front obviously drives a car and treats it, like the rest of those car-driving individualists, like a cocoon, a four-wheeled haven in which she can block out those irritating other people who seem to be in her way. She should go back to the car, if you ask me.