My Landlords

I really, really want to talk about my landlords who finally returned from their three week trailer trip around Poland. They invited me down for coffee and to get the rental contract taken care of, but wow, they’re funny. They’re an older couple who have lived in this house for a long time, raised their children here and decided to turn the upper floors and the basement into guest rooms. The man seems like a typical, happy, joking German grandpa. Sometimes I see him sprawled out on a lawn chair in the afternoon taking a nap. His wife is a bit like Martha Stewart, very into decorating and gardening. She spent the whole afternoon in her bathing suit, planting hedges in the garden, which is fairly elaborate, with a goldfish pond, etc. They have the meanest, scariest dog I have ever met in my life. When I was in the yard, they said that they would let him out to sniff me, and that I could pet him, but that I should by no means get up from where I was sitting. Apparently, he’s fine with strangers if they are sitting quietly, but if they get up he thinks they are trying to steal things and will attack them. “Just stay where you are and try not to move very much,” they told me. “Either a dog is a watch dog, or he isn’t.”
Also, the fire-safety plan that I mentioned earlier, is apparently not too far off the mark. “If there’s ever a fire,” they told me, “the staircase is made of wood and will pull the fire up just like a chimney. You’ll all be stuck up there on the fourth floor.” Here’s a picture of the flammable staircase:

In order to keep those of us living upstairs from being roasted alive, they have provided us with a thick rope which we are supposed to tie around one of the exposed beams in the ceiling (“make sure you tie it really tight”) and use to climb down the roof and onto the glass roof of their enclosed porch (“don’t jump too hard on the glass roof, because it might break”) from which I guess we can jump safely into the yard with the man-eating watch dog. They also warned me not to fall out of my bedroom window (“there’s supposed to be a grate across it, but we didn’t like the way it looked and so we took it down.) Good to know.