Pics

By the way, if you check the Home sweet Haus post, it now has pics of the inside of my new home when it was empty as well as pics of my first trip to Frankfurt. The house is all decorated now, so I need to put some updated pics on the web, but I haven't gotten that far yet. :)

The Princess and the Couch

I finally feel like I’m settled here in Germany, but it has been quite a process. You would think that since the movers dumped everything on the floor, that I would not have any trouble finding stuff, but the Korean packers were too efficient with their space. After I had gone through all my piles, I still couldn’t find many of my things. My first thought was that a box had been lost in the process, but as I continued to put things away, I noticed a trend. Even though the Koreans had emptied out the contents of all of my furniture, they had not left the drawers empty. Nor had they replaced the wrapped items back in the drawers they came from. So. The dirty laundry was thoughtfully placed in my filing cabinet, all of the pillows for my bed were safely tucked in my bar, and my lamps were stuffed behind decorator pillows in my bookshelf. :) Just where I thought they’d be. I still haven’t found my iron. Cradled in the bread maker perhaps?

After the house was semi-put away, I began the process of buying a couch. Buying a couch is much easier than buying a car, but I was much more particular about the type of couch than the vehicle. And I was definitely reminded of the princess and the pea as I sat down on at least fifty different couches that were too stiff or too low or too expensive. Germans seem to like a firm couch, so much so, that I actually winced after sitting down too hard on a couple. My pampered bottom is apparently too wimpy for German furniture. And Dan’s in trouble. Every couch that I really liked cost over $5,000. My bottom also seems to have radar for the finer things in life. :) Luckily I found a super sale at the furniture store on base, and purchased a floor model for a tenth of the price of the other couches I liked. It’s not perfect, but it’s squishy enough for me.

With the couch in place, I now have enough seating for guests, so I need to finish the decorating. I managed to hang the curtains using mostly twine, and as strange as that sounds, it actually looks pretty normal. My last challenge will be to finish hanging the pictures. Hopefully I’ll have everything done and the floors swept by Sunday because I’m having my first guests in then. And Dan gets here in two weeks!!! I’m crossing all of my appendages in hopes of having the internet settled by then.

German (in)efficiency

You hear a lot about German engineering, but efficiency is strangely lacking in this culture. I’ll start my rant with the delayed post of this blog. The company that is providing both my phone and my internet said I should hear from a technician in one to four WEEKS about my home installation and set-up. Compare that to the instant gratification I had with such things in Korea, and it seems outrageous. Meanwhile I’m considering ritual suicide or possibly an AA program to deal with my withdrawal symptoms from internet connection. No news, no friends, no family, and worse, no Dan.

Like any addict, I’m completely on edge without my internet fix, so I have not dealt well with the process of receiving my junk and setting up my home/classroom. I will start by saying that goods can be delivered anytime between 7am and 7pm, and no one seems to have any better information than this. Luckily, my classroom supplies arrived just as school was letting out, so I had the pleasant experience of completely scandalizing my administration with the presence of a truck in the middle of their dismissal procedure. Mind you, the admin has made no real effort to meet the new staff, so in addition to being scolded for using the wrong copy machine, this has been my main interaction with them. Fabulous.

The next day I had to take the day off to receive my household goods. Again 7am to 7pm, so I was trapped in my empty house with nothing but my Newsweek to keep me company. I called at noon. The office had no idea when they’d come. I called at 5pm, and they said by 7. I called at 7 because no one was here, but of course no one is working in the office at 7! So now I’ve wasted an entire day waiting, and I can’t get in touch with anyone to find out if or when the movers are actually coming. I have a small nagging doubt that either my stuff has been jettisoned on the side of the road, or they will show up as if nothing is wrong in the morning. But no! The movers are actually still working! They show up at my house at 9pm just as tired and grumpy as I am.

These guys did not speak or read English, and half the boxes were only labeled in Korean anyway, so almost nothing ended up in the right room. (For the record, I don’t think they were speaking German either.) For a while we would open boxes, and try to determine where they went, but this was way too time-consuming for the men who didn’t want to be here in the first place. Once all the stuff was in the house, they tried to convince me that it was too late to unpack, but they are required to unpack, and it is not my fault they showed up so late. And if I let them go, I am responsible for ALL the trash, which is a huge problem because trash seems to be illegal in Germany.

So after some seriously grouchy words, they started “unpacking” the boxes. I use this term loosely because what they actually did was open the boxes and dump them on the floor and on all of my sleeping surfaces. I’m left with huge piles of books, clothes, and toiletries, with my framed paintings usually on the bottom of these piles, and all round items in the corners of rooms where they rolled. The men left me at midnight with a week’s worth of mess and no place to sleep. But don’t worry, I’m planning some angry phone calls to address this last insult of inefficiency. They better watch out…with no internet, I have extra time (and angst) for lodging formal complaints. :)