Step Two

We have chosen a house! We picked the older house on the dead end street with the apple tree in the yard. It's so hard to know what will work the best for us; we just had to make the best decision we can with the information we have. I hope I won't feel isolated in the smallish kitchen. I hope the kids will come to love their attic bedrooms. I hope I won't dread going down into the cramped cellar to do laundry. I hope Dan's commute won't become a nightmare. I hope we will settle in and make it comfortable and love it!

We haven't signed the contract yet, so it isn't a done deal. I checked this morning and the house is still advertised on the rental website, which made me a little nervous. The owner has a very standard contract, so I don't think there will be any issues, but still...

I have been very focused on securing housing, which was of course priority 1. But now that it looks like that is done, I need to move immediately to step 2: furniture! Dan pointed out that we can't move in until we have at least a table and a few chairs and beds! So I am very quickly turning my attention to shopping for furniture. It didn't occur to me earlier that, just like in the US, most furniture needs to be ordered and takes weeks or months to arrive. There's really nothing we could have done about this earlier, not knowing what space we would have in our new house. But now that we have chosen a house I need to go take some measurements and get out there to shop!

IKEA is the place to go when you need fairly inexpensive furniture quickly. I went Saturday to scout out the place. It seems this IKEA is located in an area of town with several furniture stores, so I made the mistake of going in some of the other stores first just to see what else was available. Oops! I saw some beautiful expensive stuff, and we are on an IKEA budget!

I also stepped quickly into the Bauhaus, the German equivalent of Home Depot. Except this place was like 10 of our Home Depot in Missoula. This store definitely doesn't fit the rule of "everything is small in Europe" (and neither did any of the other stores I visited).

This is just one small aisle

They had a whole aisle of decorative toilet seats!!!

Some of my readers will have been to IKEA in the US, but this was my first IKEA visit. Wow. What an enormous place!

This picture definitely doesn't do justice to the enormity of this store!

The store just kept going on and on and on. It isn't a big warehouse; instead it's divided into small sections and it's like a maze to wind your way through. You just keep following the path and there is something different around every corner. I think I finally discovered that the path takes you in a circle around each floor, and when you get back to the start you can go up or down to get to a whole new level of goods. So much stuff!

This is the "closet planning" space, a room full of computers a help center where you take a number and wait your turn for help.

This is the monstrous cafeteria inside the store, where hordes of people were eating entire hot meals. No snack bar here; apparently people stay shopping at IKEA long enough to need sustenance of a full hot breakfast, lunch and dinner!

I wandered through the store, feeling more and more overwhelmed. It occurred to me that, had I found something I wanted, I had no idea how to go about buying it. I waited in line at one of the service desks and when it was my turn I asked the nice English-speaking man how the store works. I learned that there are order sheets that you carry around with you. When you see something you are interested in, you write the article number and size/color down on the order sheet. When you're ready, you wait in line at one of these service desks and they look up each item in the computer and tell you whether or not the item is in stock and, if in stock, where the item is located in their warehouse. You then proceed to the warehouse on the bottom floor, where you get a flatbed cart and you find the aisle and shelf where the item is located and you literally take the box off the shelf and place it on your cart. You wander about the warehouse picking up your boxes and head to checkout when you have everything. There is also a delivery option, which is likely what we will choose to do!

My brain was exploding with all the choices and I was ready to get out. But I had to continue in the IKEA maze to get to the exit. I swear I kept walking through sheets and towels and dishes and pots and pans and who knows what else for half an hour trying to find the exit after I had decided I was ready to go. On the way I decided to pick up a vase, since Dan had brought me some flowers the other day and I had nothing to put them in except a tall silver thermos that I found in the top cabinet. I clutched my vase and dodged many browsers as I picked up speed, now on a mission to just leave! The next leg of the journey was through the warehouse, so I knew I was close to the finish. I rounded the final corner and then...

This was the checkout scene that awaited me. Each of those lights on the yellow or blue signs represents a checkout line. There must have been 15 or 20 lines, each with 20 15-20 people in them with full carts. Unbelievable! I seriously considered ditching my 1 euro 50 vase, but I decided that I had time to wait. I chose a yellow line, which was "Express", max 15 articles. I don't know how long I waited, 15 or 20 minutes (notice the theme of 15-20...I wonder if that is an intentional design by IKEA???) When I got a little closer to the front I discovered that this was a self-checkout line. There were 4 checkout machines, but it always goes a little slower when people have to scan their own items. Finally I was next in line. I watched intently the lady in front of me to make sure I knew what to do when it was my turn. I saw how she picked up the hand scanner and scanned each item. Then I saw her swipe her payment card through the card reader and I began to glance around wildly looking for a cash option. Not seeing one, I turned around to the man behind me in line and asked "Sprechen zie Englisch?" "yes", he said. "Is this line for cards only?" "yes", he said. Aarghh! I saw something in the sign instructions about cards, but my German isn't good enough to understand that only cards were accepted in this line! (By the way, I have received my Deutsche Bank card in the mail, but am waiting on my PIN - so I can't use the card yet!) "Ugh, I just want to buy this vase!" I exclaimed in frustration. While I was eyeing the other lines, trying to decide if I wanted the vase badly enough to wait in line again, the man asked me "Would you like for me to buy it for you and you can pay me in cash?" "Would you do that?!!" I asked incredulously. He answered yes, and proceeded to do just that. Bless him!! The kindness of strangers warms my heart.

My hard-fought IKEA vase

At this point I had a splitting headache and was starving, but I knew I needed to press on because one of the other stores I was supposed to scout out was in the same area of town. I had passed it on the bus on the way to IKEA, so I struck out on foot to find it. Hard to believe there is need of another store as enormous as IKEA, yet there it was. (Actually there is not 1 but 3 IKEA stores in Berlin. I am continually amazed at the number of shops/stores/restaurants, etc. here. The city is vast and consists of block after block of shops and businesses. It's mind-boggling to think of the number of people required to work in all those shops, and the number of people required to shop at all those shops in order for them to make money. Of course it is quite a departure from Missoula, but it feels even more huge and commercial than living in Houston and Atlanta. Maybe I've just forgotten since it's been longer since I've lived there.)

The Moebel Kraft store was vast, and unlike IKEA, it was set up like an enormous warehouse on multiple floors, so you could see from the inside how huge it was.

View from the Kraft escalator

I wandered around looking at stuff, but I knew there was no point in looking if it was going to take months to get something, so I went to the information desk to ask if everything had to be ordered. When I asked if they spoke English, the 2 attendants both shook their heads. They motioned to me to wait and then one of them thumbed through the employee directory and made a call or two. I gathered that they were summoning an English speaker. :) After a few minutes someone appeared who explained to me how to look at the tag and see if an item is in stock or not. If the tag says "abholpreiss", that is literally the "collection price", meaning the item is currently in stock and you take it with you. If the tag says "lieferpreiss" that is the "delivery price" and the item needs to be ordered and delivered. Good to know!

I had been taking dozens of pictures all afternoon of pieces of furniture and their price tags and of whole decorated rooms, so I could show the kids and Dan some options. But towards the end at IKEA my phone showed a dangerously low battery. I had arranged to meet Dan later in the afternoon so I sent him a final text message that I would meet him at the restaurant at 6:00 if he didn't hear from me before then. That way if my phone died completely we would at least have a meeting point. But I couldn't let my phone die because I am ENTIRELY dependent on it for directions. I would NEVER have been a world traveler in another day and time. I can imagine trying to navigate the trains and buses of this huge city with only a paper map and a paper timetable and it's not pretty. I use Google maps every time I try to go anywhere, to tell me which bus or train to take, what time to catch it, how many stops to go, and exactly which direction to walk in once I get off the bus or train. Without this I would be completely adrift. So I HAD to keep enough charge in my battery to get directions to the restaurant. I snuck these 2 pictures of the Kraft store but didn't dare take any more. When it was time to meet Dan for dinner, I got out my notepad and paper so I could jot the directions down quickly after pulling them up in case the screen died. I was a good 40 minutes away from the restaurant so I had a lot of city to cover first by bus, then on a train. I made it!!! Whew!!

We had dinner at, of all things, a Cajun restaurant that Dan had found during his month in Berlin earlier in the fall. I had blackened catfish and he had jambalaya!

Over dinner we discussed furniture, and we have a slightly different take on it. While we both agree that we don't want to go overboard with either price or quantity of furniture, Dan is of the mindset that this is all temporary and we should get a few cheap pieces and make do. After shopping around a little I, on the other hand, would like to buy some things that I actually like and would enjoy having in our home. I went so far as to suggest that perhaps we would like a couple of items well enough to ship them back to the states at the end of this adventure, but that idea didn't go over so well. Ah well, we'll find a compromise. Dan did say that he has enough other things to worry about so that house decoration can be all mine! I am planning to go completely Euro, or at least what I picture as "Euro". Possibly what I think of as "euro" is totally tacky here, and they prefer a more American look. Ha! Well, this is my chance to decorate temporarily - to get stuff that I would never dare to get at home and go for a completely different look. The walls in our house are freshly painted white, so I know I will be using lots of color in the furniture. I love color on the walls, but it's actually kind of fun to do it the other way around for a change because I can choose any color I want for the furniture, and I don't have to worry about getting sick of that orange couch, because I will only have it for a few years! Visitos, prepare for a rainbow world in our house. :)