Making progress

I just stopped to look at the date and discovered that we have been in Berlin almost 3 months! That’s a quarter of a year, hard to believe. I am starting to acclimate to life here. While I am nowhere near able to have conversations in German, I know quite a few words and can often construct simple sentences and get my meaning across if I have to. I can conduct simple transactions at the grocery store, coffee shop, etc. without breaking into a cold sweat. I can navigate public transit with only occasional hiccups. I’m becoming a little more comfortable in the car and am no longer terrified to take it out on the road, although I can’t get complacent because occasionally I make a mistake and am so thankful that it hasn’t led to an accident. I have taken up cappuccino drinking. J I never used to be able to handle the caffeine in coffee; it made me jittery and uncomfortable, but it’s pretty hard to find caffeine-free coffee here, so I’ve gotten used to the leaded stuff. And I’ve discovered, like the rest of the world, that it helps me get through the day when I’m going on 6 hours sleep, which is most days.

I do check Facebook regularly so I can feel connected to my friends, and when I see pictures of snowy Montana it makes me simultaneously homesick for Montana’s natural beauty and also glad for the opportunity to try something different and live a different life for a while. I think loving mountains and snow and trees and lakes in a way made me afraid to leave them, and I also felt a strange pressure to get out and enjoy them by skiing and hiking and boating and camping. We did plenty of that and always had fun, but still there was a pressure like a strange nature version of keeping up with the Joneses. Maybe it’s just me and my own psychoses, but in a way it’s nice to be free from that pressure and have the freedom to do things differently for a while. The mountains and rivers will still be there for us when we get back.

But I digress. Right now I’m one of those people you envy when you walk down the street and see someone sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of the morning quietly sipping their drink and you think, “Don’t those people have to go to work?” I just had a cappuccino and a Rosinenbrotchen (raisin bun) and am working on a blog post while I wait for the start time of my next event. This is so pleasant, I hope life will settle down soon so I can spend time on my blog and my cappuccino habit on at least a weekly or semi-weekly basis!

Today I’m taking a day off from house organization and I’m attending a Berlin’s Best event. A couple of parents at the kids’ school created this group, whose purpose is to socialize while discovering the best museums, restaurants and things to do around Berlin. Last month we toured the Konzert Haus, which was very interesting, followed by a visit to the famous Gendarmenmarkt Christmas market and a lunch at a traditional German restaurant. Today we are going to the Gipsformerai, which means nothing to me but I’ll find out what it’s all about!

I titled this post “Making progress” because I intended to talk about the house and how it’s progressing. I’m pretty much out of time to do that in detail, but I’ll mention a few things and post some pictures.

Okay, a couple of days have passed now. I’d better stay on track so I can at least get something posted! So here goes.

First things first, we got a car right before Christmas. We had originally thought we could get by without a car, and we had planned to use public transit during our entire stay in Berlin. But we discovered that, unfortunately, those who can afford a car do buy one. Pretty much everyone we knew had a car, and they dismissed the notion that we didn’t need a car. Of course it’s possible to manage without one,  and I have since met one person who doesn’t own a car, but driving can often cut transit time in half so for busy people on the go it makes life easier to have the option to drive. Plus it allows us to carry loads in the car. Plus it will allow us to take weekend trips by car to places outside Berlin that can’t be reached by train or bus. If we want to we can even drive places much farther away, like to visit Dan’s family in Austria. So, we have a Volkswagen Touran and I love it.

 

The Touran in front of our house, where we get to park
it about half the time (the other half the spot is taken and
we park much farther down the street or, once, on a different
street)

 It's comfortable to drive, modern, has a GPS system, heated seats, a back-up camera and beeping noise when I get close to backing into something, and it's highly configurable. All seats but the driver fold completely down flat, and you can do it in any combination you need. Here's how I've been using it:

Taking the recycling to the recycling center

Latest IKEA run

Picking up Haley's bed that I bought on ebay,
Berlin's version of Craigslist

My biggest achievement so far is getting our closet in the master bedroom. Most houses here, unless they are very new and built in western style, don't have built-in closets so everyone buys their "closet" - external pieces of furniture in some combination of wardrobe, drawers, shelves, etc. You can go to a fancy furniture store and have someone personally help you design your space, but number 1 it's expensive and #2 you have to order it, which means it takes months for delivery. So, this is what you do if you have the money and want to have your closet for many years. If you just want a place to hang your clothes for a few years you go to IKEA. But the problem there is that the closet needs to be designed and assembled piece by piece. What size closet cabinet? How many shelves? What kind of doors? How many hinges? Drawers, and what size? What about hanging bars? Shoe cabinets? Oh yeah, and it's all in German. I have used the Container Store in the past and been so grateful for the knowledgeable staff who sits with you to draw out the closet and tells you how many shelves or drawers will fit in the allotted space and what kind of hardware you need to be able to put together the things you are buying. Not so with IKEA. They have a do-it-yourself computer program (in German) and a series of sample closets and pieces of paper with indecipherable parts and codes on them. Twice I have gone to IKEA and spent a lot of time in the closet section, once just to browse and once intending to buy, and both times I went away confused and frustrated and empty-handed. But, my savior arrived in the form of Dan's boss' wife. They invited us over for tea a few weeks ago and the topic of settling in the house came up, and I mentioned my trouble navigating IKEA and she offered to take me there. So a couple of weeks ago we met there and she spent the whole day with me and was an expert at deciphering the IKEA system and listing out all the pieces and parts that I would need. She also gave me advice on style and features. I am forever indebted to her, thank you thank you Stephanie!! I was so excited that day to have accomplished that enormous task. Dan has spent the last 10 days or so putting it together, and here it is:

You would never know how much work was necessary to
achieve this!

So now we are able to get our clothes out of the boxes and up off the floor. What an improvement! This was our "closet room" before:

I had bought two cheap hanging racks from IKEA and we tried to organize by putting things in boxes and stacking them, but the boxes were hard to get to and they would sag and collapse. Our stuff is cleaner and we feel much more civilized now that we have a real closet. Plus, now our stuff is mostly out of the other room and now I can turn that room into my office/the guest bedroom. I have already bought the day bed/guest bed as well as a desk/scrapbooking table, so those are on the list of things that need assembly and then that room will start to take shape.

The closet room

What a mess

You see that we are sleeping on our mattresses on the floor. Yesterday I ordered our bed! That is the last major thing we are lacking, because a week ago I ordered the couch and a chair for the living room. Of course we still need bookshelves, a dresser or two, maybe another chair here and there. But I'm pretty sure I can get many of the remaining things on the second hand market, which means we can pick them up immediately and start using them. The bed will be here in 5-6 weeks. Our couch and chair will take 8-9. So, our things will arrive in time for us to use them for a couple of months before our first year in Germany is over and we go back to the US for a month! Crazy.

Here is our dining table and chairs, which was our very first piece of furniture. It only had a 10 day delivery period, so it arrived in time for us to have a table for Christmas dinner. I also bought the standing lamp before Christmas, since there's not even a bare lightbulb in the dining room for light. The brown cabinet on the left is a large filing cabinet that I bought used earlier this week so I can start getting all our papers organized and up off the floor. It weighs a TON (it's made of real wood) and Dan and I struggled to load it into our car to get it home. But, what a bargain - it is a beautiful piece and it came with four drawers full of empty file folders and filing binders like they use here in Germany. Those can be 3 or 4 euros a piece and I paid 30 Euros for the whole lot of it, so it was an exceptionally good deal. Now we just need to heave it up the stairs to Dan's office!  

A quick digression: being in a huge city like Berlin has really made me feel deeply our environmental footprint. There are SOOOO many people here and we are all eating and driving and wearing clothes. When you ride a bus through the city and you see block after block of stores, all selling things in plastic or paper packaging, and you see a cluster of 3 or 4 grocery store choices every 5 or 6 blocks, each chock full of goods. When you see house after house and apartment after apartment, all of which are furnished with wood and leather and plastic furniture, and everyone has a closet full of clothes and shoes and each year they buy new stuff. When you go to IKEA and buy a carful of items, each packed in a large cardboard box, with hardware wrapped in plastic bags and manual after paper manual packed inside, and you know you are one of thousands of people who pass through the store every day buying a carful of stuff. When I do all these things, I feel a little overwhelmed at the resources it takes to keep us all fed and clothed and satisfy our desire for nice homes and nice clothes. Yes, Berlin has a good recycling program, but the best use of resources is to not consume them in the first place. It's very easy to get caught up in new, new new, and finding the exact right thing, plus it's often easier to just go to a store to get something rather than continue to daily browse the for sale ads to see if an item I am looking for shows up. But I am more committed now than ever to try to get as many things second hand as I can. Not only is it way cheaper, but there's no packaging. An added bonus is that many things are either already assembled or at least partially assembled, just disassembled enough so that they fit in the car. I feel good about reusing, and I probably should have done even more of it. [By the way, in case you were wondering, I didn't buy the couch and chair I went to look at a week or so ago. It wasn't in great shape and I didn't really have room for that big puffy furniture.]

I am being long-winded. This is so much more fun than anything else I am supposed to be doing. But I should wrap it up. Here are some more photos of our progress:

Haley's room is the farthest along. She's the only one with a bed, and she was the first to have a closet. I bought them both used over Christmas break. That was quite an adventure! We had just gotten the car and I was terrified to drive it, but with the kids home from school it was a lot harder for me to go somewhere to shop, plus I knew I could save money buying things used. So I went crazy browsing ads, responding in German thanks to Google Translate, coordinating a price and a pick-up time, navigating around Berlin within a 15 km radius from our house, knocking on someone's door, paying in cash, lugging things to the car (often down several flights of stairs), and making my way, white-knuckled, back home again. Haley's pink wardrobe was the first thing I bought and I really had to wonder if I wasn't a little crazy. I went alone, at about 8:30 at night. I went without help or tools. I knew almost no German. I was very lucky that the nice man who was selling the cabinet got his tools out and disassembled the cabinet for me, then helped me carry it all down to my car. I drove way too far to get it, so I have since shortened my search radius to 10k!

Here is our homework station that has just begun to get used. It's a really nice Moll adjustable desk, bought used for a good price, and a new chair ordered from Amazon (sorry). We are still holding all the boxes from our move here in the Wintergarten. Now that we have unpacked the boxes that were holding our clothes in the "closet room", I have contacted the movers to come back and carry away all our packing material and so that room will get cleared out on Monday!










The TV was one of our first purchases. We have watched a couple of movies and played some Rock Band and wii. The kids across the street of course are attracted to the video games. I haven't yet even turned on German TV! One of these days I will, because it will actually be a good way to help learn the language. The TV table was a coup for me - the same one I liked from IKEA but purchased used, in good condition, and assembled, for about half price.

Carter has a closet we are almost finished putting together. I look for one used but couldn't find one that fit his unique space requirements in his room. His bed is on the floor and he claims he likes it that way, but every morning I find him on the floor, having rolled off his mattress in the night. So I'll buy him a used bed frame one of these days.

 Just last night Dan finished putting together this under-sink cabinet in our bathroom.

Now we can get some things off the window sill!

There are lots of desks for sale on ebay. This one was reasonably priced and came with a rolling cart of drawers. Once again I drove way too far to get it and showed up unprepared. An exceptionally nice man who spoke very good English once again disassembled it for me and helped carry it down several flights of stairs. Then, it wouldn't all fit in my car so he actually put some of it in his car and followed me on the 20 minute drive to our house! He was so so kind. I didn't pay him nearly enough for the desk to get that kind of service. And, unbelievably, a couple of days later there was an envelope in my mailbox with a note attached: he had forgotten to give me a small piece of the desk, and had driven over to our house to deliver it. Truly, above and beyond! Many people I meet are surprised when I say that I have met some really nice people in Berlin, because it is certainly not known for being a friendly place. And I definitely wouldn't call it a friendly place, but I have met some incredibly friendly and helpful individuals. They stand out even more since so many people are not that way. This man was a gem.

View of the kitchen from the hall

 As I mentioned in a previous post, the kitchen needs some help. The dish cabinets are up too high, the pantry doesn't have enough shelves, and the counter is too small. As a result, the kids can't reach the dishes, it's hard to prepare food on the small countertop, and we have a bunch of stuff sitting around taking up space that should be put away. Tuesday I went back to IKEA to try to remedy that (it's an IKEA kitchen so I wanted to match). It took all day, but I learned how to construct an IKEA kitchen and discovered which components are available that will help us with the kitchen space. I came away with a whole new cabinet/shelving unit that can sit next to the existing ones and house the microwave and the dishes. And I also got a freestanding "countertop" that we will need to take to a home improvement store and cut to fit our space. I bought legs for it, and it will go in front of the window on the left and double as extra countertop space as well as a dining counter. I will buy a couple of barstools that can scoot under when I'm cooking and pull out when someone wants to eat there. I'm pretty pleased with how the design turned out; now we need to build it all and see if it actually looks okay and works for us!

I have just one square of countertop to work on; the microwave
and compost bin take up a lot of space

A trashcan, dishes with no place to go, bags of recycling, and
containers of fruit are currently just sitting around

And, finally, here is Carter's haircut, in case you were wondering. I think it turned out pretty good! They called it a "basic surfer haircut". :)