#awista

A fireworks display over the Alstadt and the Rhein in Düsseldorf, photo courtesy of the Rheinische Post.

Our little family is back together in Düsseldorf after a few weeks, and a blog break, home in Kentucky’s bluegrass.  Being back in America was of course a wonderful time.  I had gotten so used to tuning out the white noise of German speech or struggling to understand after catching a few words or phrases that hearing constant English around became a welcome respite for the brain.  And of course the sight of family and friends was all too quickly tempered by having to say goodbye all over again.

It’ll take a couple days, or longer, to adjust back to the time difference and all the other routines I had established, but it appears Düsseldorf is still recovering from the holidays as well.  We missed the New Year’s celebrations here, but even with arriving on the 3rd of January the remnants of the party still remained visible nearly everywhere.

A fair amount of fireworks litter on a street corner in our neighborhood.  These aren’t simply bottle rockets and black jacks either.

The local trash company, Awista, working hard to clean up the Rheinpark.  They had a lot of work to do.

Germans celebrate New Year’s Eve (Silvester) like Americans ring in the 4th of July; loads of booze and fireworks.  Champagne or sparkling wine is a popular choice, judging by tradition and the street side remnants. The normally pristine parks and city streets remained littered with the refuse of these events from the weekend as we undertook our morning walk through the Rhinepark. This with word that the trash companies had already worked twice to clean many of the city streets.

 Overflowing trash cans and unrecycled bottles littered the park this morning.

Good Germans still managed to slog their bottles to the local recycling bins, though those two suffered under the strain of the New Year’s celebration.

Fortsetzung der Reihe, harte Jobds die viel zu wenig honoriert werden!