Ah, the memories!
When I first arrived in Germany, I was taken to my new home. Located in a quaint little farming village, about 2 miles south of Kandern, called Hammerstein. I had told the school that I'd be happy to either have my own place or to share one with another staff member, and they had placed two of us new guys together -- me and Michael Lee. Well, Michael had arrived a day earlier and had been introduced to the house set aside for us -- but he had refrained from claiming a room as his own, in deference to me, his as-yet-unmet roommate. So when I arrived, I was dropped off at the house and introduced to Michael. We then proceeded to discuss who got which room, like this:
Michael: Which room would you want?
Me: Oh, doesn't matter. Which room do you want?
Michael: Oh, I don't care. Anything is fine. Which would you prefer?
Me: Really, any is fine. I suppose the downstairs rooms are more convenient. So, one of them.
Michael: Yeah, that's what I was thinking, too.
Me: So, which one would you prefer?
Michael: It doesn't matter, whichever one you don't want.
Me: Me too, whichever one you don't want.So (after a few minutes of this highly fruitful conversation) we were about to toss a coin, when I just said, "Oh, I'll take the one on the corner; it has two windows, and therefore more light. I like light." And that was that.
So, what did that room look like? Allow me to take you on a tour of the whole house...
Read the Story of the Hammerschtink House.
If you really want to, you can also watch a 14-second final clip of the Hammerschtink House Tour. Note, however, that it is rather large - about 2.4 MB. That's about 80 times larger than the photo at the bottom of this page. If you're on a dial-up connection, you probably don't want to wait that long. But... if you have a fast connection, then here's a really silly finale to the Hammerschtink House Tour: oversized video clip here. [You probably want to RIGHT-click it, and choose "Save Target As..."]
Finally, here is my very first sunset in Germany (1 August 2003), from out my bedroom window: