Chapter Three: Hotel Living

The first six weeks we resided over in Germany, we lived in a hotel. Hotels in general aren’t actually designed for large families and by European standards ours, with four children, is a large family. And secondly, hotels are not designed for living; just for sleeping. Thus, we were in for some long, interesting days ahead as we squeezed all six of us into a place that was designed for two, day and night, seven days a week. Cory took our only vehicle, the nine passenger rental van, to work each morning while the kids and I stayed behind to do school and attempt to entertain ourselves with a few toys, card games, books, German television and a laptop computer with limited and expensive internet access.

There were only enough sparse dishes in the cupboards for one meal for our family. Thus, hand washing the dishes after each and every meal also became part of our daily routine. In fact, there were only four of each kitchen utensil and dishware in our hotel apartment and we actually had to scrounge several dishes from the two single rooms across the hall, where my older kids were sleeping, to have enough for everyone. We quickly tired of Hamburger Helper and Rice-A-Roni as these quick and easy prep meals were our staple diet in our tiny hotel kitchen.


The dining room table was a fold-down table in the living room that only seated two people at a time. We either took turns eating in shifts of two or we seated the two youngest (ages 2 and 5) at the table while the rest of us sat on the couch or floor sharing the tiny coffee table. German television (at least in the hotel) was an interesting experience. In the afternoons we would tune in to old 1990 sitcoms like The Nanny or Step-by-Step with Suzanne Somers and Patrick Duffy that were voiced over in German.

The older kids learned to retreat with their school books to their own rooms across the hall after breakfast was consumed and cleaned up. In between breakfast and lunch, I was helping the kids with school work and trying to help them pass the time creatively. Homeschooling is illegal in Germany and even though it was legal for us as Americans living and working there under international agreements, it was still very rare, misunderstood and viewed as highly suspect. Thus, the older, school aged kids were bound to the small hotel rooms from early in the morning until about lunchtime as the local schools were only in session from about 7:30am to 1:00pm most week days.

The hotel staff came in once a week and changed the sheets and towels, vacuumed, cleaned the bathroom and emptied the garbage. We had a few sparse cleaning supplies to use in between times to keep up with everything. Emptying the small garbage cans and carrying it downstairs to the dumpsters in the parking garage became an almost daily task since we were eating so many ready-made kinds of foods. We tried to keep a plastic grocery sack or two on the kitchen floor for recycling kinds of things (glass, cardboard, metal cans) and when it got full Cory took it to the recycling on base. It was getting us in the practice of recycling which would be an absolute necessity once we moved into a rental house.

We quickly found a small neighborhood park just a block from the hotel. I started daily jaunts there with the two youngest girls while the older ones were doing their school work in the mornings. Or the young ones would go out the glass patio door into the back patio courtyard for some fresh air and exercise instead. The interesting thing about this “private” patio was that our apartment truly was the only one with access to it. However, the hotel was built with one entire wing around this central patio. So, it was like a fish bowl with every nearby back window looking down onto it. And with concrete, stucco, exterior walls on every side, sounds bounced and reverberated around the entire square. My two and five year old children are not quiet children and so all their noisy, rambunctious play echoed around and was shared with each and every nearby hotel room. Fortunately, most of the hotel guests were business travelers and hopefully they were already awake or better yet gone by mid mornings but the back patio situation was still a bit uncomfortable for me.


We had laundry facilities at the hotel but they were expensive. They had one washing machine and it cost 3 Euros per load. They had two dryers and drying is free but extremely slow. The German washing machines are much smaller and slower than American ones so you can only fit less than half of a “normal” load into it. So, once a week we drove to the nearest Army Base (Panzer) and did our laundry at the 24 hour laundry mat there. It only cost $1.25 to wash and just 25 cents to dry (for 15 minutes of time). So, with all the washing machines I could usually have 5 to 7 loads done in 20 minutes and then it would take another half hour to 45 minutes to dry everything. While I did the laundry, Cory usually took the kids across the parking lot to the bowling alley for dinner and bowling. We found that there was half price bowling on Mondays so that was usually when we were there doing laundry in the evenings.

During the afternoon time after lunch I would put my two year old down for a nap and use the internet to try and find a rental house large enough for our family that was affordable and nearby to my husband’s job location. This seemed like a monumental task at the time. Germans don’t have a central database for accessing rental information and I couldn’t exactly pick up a local paper and read it. Each realtor has their own individual listings and when you rent a place through them, you are expected to pay at least the equivalent of one month’s rent toward their realtor’s fees. The places we were looking at renting were going to cost almost $2000/month, that’s some expensive realtor fees for finding a place to rent! But after a couple of weeks in the hotel our family was highly motivated to find a different place to live.