One man's trash is another man's treasure

The past week has brought about two interesting things we have experienced.

In church on Sunday,  a real loaf of bread was served for communion. The pastor broke the large loaf apart and large pieces were passed throughout the congregation for individuals to pull off a small portion. Eric thought they cannot serve stale crackers to Germans with how picky they are about their bread. We both agreed this sweet bread was tastier than crackers and thought it was probably cheaper than crackers, too. 

After church, we arrived home to find good and dismantled furniture in the one parking spot. My guess was someone got evicted since it was the end of the month and they were clearing out the apartment. Later in the afternoon, a few trucks  stopped by to sort through it and by night there was a truck every hour or so stopping as we could hear the noise outside our windows.

On our walk to town Monday morning, I noticed there was more furniture, rugs, and other household items in various driveways, parking spots, and on the sidewalk. By Monday afternoon, there were over 10 small delivery vans driving up and down our street searching for furniture.  I saw my neighbor, Brigette, who informed me that our area has a furniture trash day 3  times a year and people from Poland, Hungary, and Czech, come and pick up the items before the German garbage truck comes on Tuesday to collect it. Our state, Hesse, is the only area that does this within Germany. Throughout the rest of the country, people can only dispose of furniture once a year and/or they have to pay a large fee. After she informed me of this, I noticed the same 3 or 4 vehicles would drive past every 15 minutes. It should be noted, some vans had father/ daughter teams, husband/wife, or 3 guys piled in and while one drove , the other crew members were out the window searching every space between the them and the houses looking for items. I was so nervous the rest of the day as this was not good timing of bringing home my new car to be parked on the streets with these vans zooming around.

I decided to put a satellite dish and it's parts (attachment hardware, remote control, receiver,etc) out in the evening. Someone returning to the US gave it to us as they thought we could use it, but I think they did not want to take the time  to dispose of it when they left. It was not on the sidewalk for more than 3 minutes, when  a truck drove by, stopped, realized he could not back up his truck due to the parked cars, so he parked his van and came walking back down the street to look at it. I made sure he took everything it came with as I did not want to figure out how to get rid of it. He then asked me if I had any bikes, tires, or wheels. 

It was quite the entertainment watching items slowly disappear from the lare pile across the street. It was also interesting how numerous local people were walking around searching through the furniture piles for good finds. By Tuesday morning, there were only a handful of pieces left for the garbage truck men to pick-up from what started as a large pile on Sunday.

The rest of the week was calm and cool. Wednesday, we had a high of 60 degrees.  It has also been raining periodically, so it feels more like fall here than summer.  Hopefully we can get out to enjoy the weekend, as they are predicting sunshine and 70s.