The Move is upon us

The Move is upon us.

The "No parking"-signs have been posted in front of our house.
The apartment is full of cardboard boxes, luggage and a stack of stuff for the painting bee stands in the corner of the huge bathroom, which I'm going to miss, even though in the new apartment there are two toilets. But there is no 15 sqm bathroom! Somebody once mentioned living on top of a pub in London in a one-room apartment that was smaller than the bathroom. It is so big that we actually put our garden furniture in it.

We bought a box of beer for the painters on Saturday. Now it can officially be called a painting bee(r).

We visited the new flat twice today. First to see if everything was ready and the second time when everything was supposed to be ready. We still found a few things to repair and hopefully they can be taken care of tomorrow so that everything is fixed and clean by Wednesday when our boxes start to arrive.

Afterwards, we went to a new pub, a Kneipe called Mausefalle (Mousetrap). Our landlady knows the owner and showed us the pub. It seemed like a very nice establishment. We'll have to visit it again.

In the evening our next-door neighbors came, as agreed, to pick up a small desk. The first thing out of their mouths as they arrived was: "You're moving away. We oppose." It was very moving. Ended up discussing biology at their new aquarium, which had a lot of plants, some fast snails and no fish.

My friend Yrjö called and wanted to find out more about the German bureaucracy. I tried to help, although the best advice would probably be to recommend reading Franz Kafka and staying as far away from official buildings as possible. As a matter of fact, I find the German bureaucracy an extremely powerful machine, where things go in and eventually, inevitably they get processed and finally a result appears. Sometimes years later, but in the end a result, a decision appears.

Seen on the wall of a customs office in Bochum "Why do you hate civil servants? They haven't done anything".

The Move is upon us.