Neighbors

Once again it has been awhile since I’ve been on here and once again I’m traveling. I guess trains and airports bring out the blogger in me, or this is where I have the most time. So this first entry is mostly a vent bout the new neighbors. As you may remember, I introduced you to the neighbors when I moved into my apartment just over a year ago. A lot has changed in the past year. For awhile the building was substantially below capacity with 3 empty apartments. These three have since been filled and I think it’s time to introduce the new tenants. First in was a single woman in her mid to late 20’s. She rides a bike but other than that does not leave much sign of her existence. She joined in a few BBQ’s this summer and is quite nice. She’s recently finished her degree in architecture and works in the field but other than that I know little about her. She’s quiet and reasonable social, a good neighbor. She lives 2 floors above us. Next in are our next door neighbors; Dennis, his wife, their two kids and for awhile a female friend who had apparently recently buried her father and two mangy dogs. So, first impression, they seam nice enough but look a bit ghetto and have loud children. They have lived next door for about four months , maybe a bit more. They are terrible neighbors. The kids scream and cry a lot more than seems age appropriate, the youngest is often wearing only a diaper when they open the door and it is not warm here and the dogs are long haired and often wander the building with their owner in tow ohne leash. The kids do not go to bed when kids should but rather pound on the floors and scream keeping up the other neighbors. I’ve never even officially met the wife but no one uses their key so the door bell is constantly ringing which sets off the dogs and sometimes the kids. Both parents are unemployed and home all day everyday. We live across the street from a park, they have 2 kids and 2 dogs so one would assume they would go to said park but I’m not even sure they know what a park is because they only leave the house to walk the dogs or go grocery shopping. Additionally they are noisy and do not realize it is none of their business if Patrick owns a bike but does not ride it or borrows his mom’s Mercedes when his care is broken. On top of all this they recruited friends for the last open apartment. Which brings me to our most recent addition…the Upstairs neighbors. Living directly above us, these people knocked on our door to ask if we would mind if they moved in at 8:00pm. Patrick granted permission, 8:00pm is fine and it was really nice of them to ask. We had to ask them to stop banging and moving furniture at midnight and even then, they continued to make a considerable amount of noise until 1:00am. This is not okay. So we didn’t get off to a good start. The word on the street was that our new neighbors would be a single mother of 2. Let’s try a family of 5, in a 2 bedroom apartment! There’s one boy who is somewhere around 17, another who looks about 13, one who is about 7 and a newborn baby girl plus a dog. A mother who wears way too much make-up and a mysterious father who I’ve seen at the grocery store but never met in the apartment. If our next door neighbors are terrible the upstairs neighbors are the neighbors from Hell! Like their friends they are always home and it seems also unemployed, the kids run through the stairs and hang out next door all the time – more doorbell ringing and dog barking! I’m not even sure if these children go to school because I hear them all the time. It honestly sounded like they were bowling with children one day last week! Inside they are noisy but outside they are messy with bicycles strewn about sometimes in front of the door and stolen grocery store carts proudly displayed in the “yard” – I use this term loosely because we have a driveway sized cement yard. They are dirty and produce a lot of trash and refuse to pay the woman who cleans the hallways monthly who is actually one of our nice neighbors. I often find one or two of the children in the hallway any time I open our door. This morning it was the one who is about 13 wearing a crewneck, no pants and mismatched socks and carrying 2 baby bottles. These last two sets of neighbors are of the breed who should not be able to procreate. They’ve also made me resent the German social system which pays financial rewards for children and allows people to sustain families on social support while unemployed. If welfare is everything that is wrong with America because of its potential for abuses, then kinder geld is everything that is wrong with Germany because it can also be abused. Paying people to have children seems like a good way to encourage population but I think it may just encourage those at the bottom of the food chain to reproduce in order to maintain an unemployed life style. I would love to find some studies on the income and level of education of people with children since kindergeld and before.