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I really must get some photos of the area taken – but the weather has been fairly awful since we arrived.

I did make it out for a two hour walk on Saturday but forgot my camera! :-(

To roughly describe it we are in a large valley of the Saar river. On the opposite side of the valley to us there are steep hills and cliffs which are mostly covered in woods and forests, the steepness makes them inhabitable. The river snakes quite a bit so the valley has an interesting shape. To picture the river it is about half the width of the Thames just near the Houses of Parliment – too wide for many bridges so you have to go for a while in each direction before you can cross it.

This side of the river there is Serrig the village Nicole grew up in. Between Serrig and the Saar is a road and some fields so none of the properties here are on the edge of the river – which probably reflects a history of the occasional flood. Serrig is all set on the side of the valley there are a few properties on the flat near the river – but most go up the side of the valley. The population is about 1500 so it is not a great size but it can still support a baker, a butcher, a grocer, a florist, a bank and two pubs.

Around Serrig there are a few fields, but mostly the land is either Vineyards or woodland – there is an impressive chateau that looks down on the village from one of the vineyards.

On Saturday I went for a walk along the river and then up into the woods and back to Serrig which took two hours. Along the way I manged to spot two deers and a wild pig and her 8 piglets following her about.

I have to say that is really relaxing here and I will certainly enjoy the two months here, but I must remember to carry my camera more!

OK this doesn’t sound like a very interesting title for a post I know – but I have finally been able to understand why registration plates mean something different to Nicole than they do to me.

Ever since Nicole moved to the UK she has noticed regisration plates – foreign cars (especially German ones) and sometimes English ones also. I never look at registration plates – unless for some reason I am forced to, in traffic jam say or when following the same car for ages on motorway. I might know the end three letters for a few friends cars so that I could recognise them but nothing more.

I have always found it strange how Nicole knows the whole of the registrations from all her family and some of her friends – firstly I thought this was something peculiar to Nicole but then found out that this seems to be quite common in Germany.

Now that we have had to register our van I found out much more about the German registrations plates – and it all makes sense.

The first two letters (as you possibly know) represent the city that the car is registerd in, M for Munich and HH for Hamburg and in this region it is TR for Trier.  Then there are two more letters and then 3 numbers. When we went to register the van I found out that for €10 you can pick the letters and numbers and most people do – and therefore there is a system for them also.

I know from the top of my head Nicole’s dad’s registration plate as it has his initials and the last three numbers are the month and day of his birthday. Our van has my name AL and the last three numbers are the day after Nicole and I met (the actual day was already taken).

So what I have realised is that once you know the system you keep noticing cars on the road, if I am walking in the village and there is a car coming towards me I look at the first two letters straight away – if they are not TR I probably don’t know the people inside. If they are then I might see if I recognise the car then look at the next two letters to guess who it might be from their initials – honestly I didn’t start this on purpose like a train spotter I just suddenly realised I was doing it – they all do here!

So there you go – another little mystery about Nicole solved for me – each day I learn more! :-D

I have been looking for this since hearing it on the Scott Mills show – absolutely brilliant – I can watch it so many times and still laugh!

The best bit is when Gaylord fetches his bone :-D

Well a week has gone by and we are settled in and things seem to be good so far. The weather has not been too good quite cold and a lot of rain (but I don’t mind that as I get to wond them up about terrible German weather!).

Staying at Nicole’s parents is quite an easy life – Hanne (Nicole’s mum) pretty much does everything here – the washing, ironing and cooking and that has suited us quite well.

Currently Nicole is lying asleep on the sofa withher sister Sandra on the other sofa – they were both out until 5am drinking with another sister Silke. I decided to have an easier night and leave the sisters to it  – which I cam glad of as they seem to have had a good night and Nicole could have a night off translating for me which I think much be a relief.

We are off to Cologne a bit later on to she the new place that Sandra lives and will stay there tonight and go to see FC Cologne play football tomorrow. I will be interested to see how it is when beer is allowed in the stadium – unlike in the UK for football, but I don’t expect it to be very different to UK Rugby matches.

We must also go this afternoon to help Nicole’s other sister Kerstin built the new nursery for their new child that is due in June.

That is life – stress free, nice working environment, and hardly anything to worry about when not working – I think I will only cope with so much relaxing  – but I will enjoy it while it lasts – I think in Spain it will be much more stressful.

For some reason Nicole and I seem to be spending the majority of our time in the basements of other people’s houses.

We currently live in the basement of Nicole’s parents house – where we have a nice size bed room, a storage room and a good sized toilet and shower room. The bed room is quite crowded and has many unpacked boxes littering it – but is nice enough. The windows in our room are all quite small and high-up and the weird thing is that there is no need for this. Although we are technically in a basement as it is below the rest of the house – all the walls around us are full length on the other side – even those that are external – so there really is no reason for such high windows.

So that is where we sleep – and we also have an office set-up at one of Nicole’s sister’s houses – again this is in the basement.

You might start to pity us and our underground lives but again this cellar is all above the ground and gets lots of light – the windows on one side are high but on the other there is a glass door / window that can be used to access outside. I think it is all very nice myself – it is a pity the windows aren’t a little lower because when sitting at a desk it is not possible ot see the outside world which is something I miss (every so often I stand up to have a look!).

Another interesting feature of the house we work (which belongs to Nicole’s sister Kerstin and her husband Timo) is that in the guest toilet on the ground floor – there is a urinal!!! I have never seen one of these in someone’s home!

More exciting cultural updates soon!

One of our aims in moving to Valencia is that we are much more flexible in being able to move the next time we want to move. We have managed to amass so much stuff so far in our lives and we want to get rid of a load of the clutter and just be able to fit our lives into a set of cardboard boxes – load up the van and move on.

In total time it will probably take about 8 weeks for us to have sorted though all of our stuff in the UK and box it up, redecorate our house and buy a van to travel in. When we are in Valencia we would love to just be able to decide to move onto somewhere else and know that all we have to do is hand our notice on a flat in and then pack up and move on!

We started the process of decluttering our lives this weekend by sorting out the loft. The loft has just had stuff added to it since I moved into the house in 2002 and then when I went away in 2003 I moved everything up there and only took out the stuff I really needed when I came back in 2004. In 2004 we also added a load of stuff from Nicole’s parents house and in 2006 my mum gave me a load of stuff that had been sitting up in her loft.

So this weekend was spent going through all of this and categorising this as either going with us, going up into my mum’s new loft, going to a charity shop or going to the tip. This took a very long time and has made our house a complete tip. Luckily at lunchtime today we got rid of the last of the stuff for charity shops (4 different charity shop visits with a full car!). We have visited the tip three times with a full car and tonight we will drive over to my mum’s and load up her loft with all the stuff we just couldn’t chuck out!

The spare room at the moment is our store room for the stuff we want to take with us – it just feels great to be able to look in there and see how little stuff we have got our lives down to .

I think over the next 6 weeks we will probably decide to get rid of some more stuff especially as we cope with the reality of the size of the van we are getting and realise we are going to have to take even less than we thought.

Whilst we are here we are touring around on our bikes and trying to work out which areas are which. We have looked at adverts for flats to rent in estate agent windows and also in the local newspapers and have seen various areas advertised and now have a rough idea of the prices for the areas, but we also wanted to be able to see the areas.

Yesterday we went for a cycle down the coast about 10-12 miles, we are staying in a village to the south of Valencia called Pinedo which is just inside a national park. The Park is there because there is a large freshwater lake and the land around this lake is used to grow rice, this agriculture and the sand dunes are what the park is protecting.

The cycle south was lovely, we were curious to see what two of the villages / towns were like at the other end of the park (which is about 12 miles long). The village we are in is very nice – but it has one thing that spoils it – the port of Valencia which is to the north. The port spoils the view in a few ways – the lights are always on and this mucks up the sight of the stars at night, if you look to the north the cranes of the port are always there and if you look to the south in the distance on the water you can normally see a few boats queueing to get into the port (huge cargo boats that must be about 0.5 km long).

We were interested in seeing if the villages further south were that bit nicer without the proximity of the port.

The cycle was really nice, through the sand dunes and on a newly built path that was part of the improvements to Valencia that were made for the Americas Cup this year. Eventually we reached the first village, El Saler, this was nice but quite a way from the sea – then we saw lots of huge apartment blocks, with the sand dunes around them. The strange thing was there was no one there, this was before the siesta so there was no reason for it to be so quiet. The setting of these tower blocks was actually in the sand dunes and there was lots of trees between each block so the lack of noise and people seemed quite appropriate.

We cycled on, at one point we stopped to put on sun cream and watched a team of park rangers who were being taught how to use a Segway which I thought was really interesting, but most of the cycling was through the dunes and park land. We then arrived at El Perellonet and then the park evaporated to be replaced by lots of tower blocks and the odd set of smaller houses.

El Perellonet was one of the places we had seen adverts for and were interested finding out more about – it sounded nice in the national park and also not too far from Valencia. What we found was not what we had expected!

The tower blocks and other houses were all deserted – there was no one there. We had heard that people in Valencia had places to go to at the weekends but did not expect them to be on this scale. There was block after block after block and then some smaller terraced houses and more blocks – all within about 150 meters from the beach – and all seemed to be empty. We must have cycled 3 miles along this area near the beach and all of it was covered in property, but we only saw about 30 people!

The shame is we took no pictures because I think it would have explained it better than I can with words. We are very glad we went though as it would be awful to live in one of these villages in the winter or maybe even just in the middle of the week. The next time we are likely to visit El Perrellonet will be in May and I am sure it will look a lot different then!