Tuesday, October 02, 2007
You know that Autumn is in full swing when:- Children at the school are collecting acorns and chestnuts to send to Haribo in exchange for gummi bears. (Haribo sends the nuts to local zoos for animal feed.) My middle girls are very excited about this and have pockets full of chestnuts for Haribo.
- The strip of road just outside of Teveren is full of nut collectors - families with children perched in the trees with long sticks knocking the nuts down so the parents can gather them, old couples with dogs filling plastic bags, young kids in groups on bicycles with baskets or wagons... every time I drive by that stretch of road, it's like a party with great numbers of people under the filbert trees collecting the valuable nuts (6 Euros/Kg at the stores). I've even seen kids sitting in the trees knocking down nuts on blustery rainy days.
- Sugar beat mountains litter the countryside and fill the large trailer trucks rumbling by my home day and night causing my front windows to vibrate.
- Locals start hanging nuts and corn in mesh bags outside on the brick walls to dry the contents for winter. The nuts, they eat. The corn is animal food.
- Vast fields of corn disappear overnight - from 6' stalks to 3" stubble. All of it ground for animal feed.
- All the hedges in the country are pruned, or so it seems. They all get ready for winter. The hedges are now perfect.
- All the windows now have kites, leaves, or pumpkins in them. The chocolate shops and bakeries are making chocolate pumpkins, hedgehog cakes, and gingerbread cookie kites.
- Children in the kindergartens are painting apple pictures and making paper kites.
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Life In Germany
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