HHG

Household goods are here!  Our stuff!  We have our stuff!

I am simply in awe of the psychological effect that receiving your things has on a person.

For instance, somewhere deep in my psyche, I did know that I had just moved to Germany.  However, I was physically living out of suitcases, so psychologically, this experience has sort of felt like a very odd vacation.  Like the most boring version of Amazing Race ever.  We were just flown to a different country where we didn’t speak the language (although, to be fair, lots of people speak ours), and given a list of tasks to complete. 

Attend in-processing at 17 different offices (finance, transportation, etc…), get cell phones, pass a driver’s test, retrieve your vehicle and have it properly registered with your new country, find somewhere to live, sign up for loaner furniture, start a new job (for John), try to find a new job (for me), shop for appliances not brought over from the states, get internet hooked up at the house (ha!), and on and on and on.

But it never felt like “oh, yes, of course, I live here now.”

Then Friday arrived.  We were told by transportation that our HHG would be delivered between 8 am and 9 pm.  We were somewhat hopeful that they would arrive early because they arrived at 8 am on the dot with our Unaccompanied Baggage.  We were also hoping for maybe 9 am so we could shuffle some items around seeing as Housing won’t pick up their loaner items until Monday.  (Making unpacking a challenge as we have an extra couch and dinette table in the living room, extra chests of drawers in the office, and an extra bed in pieces throughout the house.  Oh, and easy chairs stacked on the stairway landing and dinette chairs in the garage.  Why didn’t we put everything in the garage you ask?  Because we didn’t want to navigate the winding stairs with heavy and/or awkward shit.  We will let the housing movers deal with it.)

But I digress.

The movers arrived at 7 am.  Luckily (or unluckily?) for me, I had slept about an hour the night before in part because it was so hot, there was a mosquito buzzing around me which sparked what I believe to be very mild case of PTSD after having my legs devoured the week before, and the loaner bed that may be part evil.  So I was up at 6 am without the aid of an alarm.  (A rarity.)

The only hiccup we had was the freak rain storm that started at about 8 am.  In the end, it subsided, and we had the entire truck unloaded by about noon.  (The other sort-of hiccup was the sweaty shirtless German mover leaning his entire sweaty body into my $2500 mattress as him and his associate hauled it up the winding stairs.  Yummy!)  We had a quick lunch, set to unpacking, got the bed put together, and got the kitchen unpacked.

Two days later and we are still working on the details, although I believe that we are about 90% unpacked.  And we are both exhausted.  My feet hurt, my back aches, and my head is numb from trying to process it all.  Thank god for my bed; German sweat or not, it’s still the most comfortable bed ever.

Yesterday (Saturday), we did break away from the house to do some shopping at Real (pron. Ree-all) and a home depot like store that I can’t remember the name of.  Real is like Walmart.  With booze.  I was ecstatic to find Marsala wine there as the commissary does not carry it.  Not even the cooking kind!  John needed bolts for our satellite dish.  He happened to get an AFN dish and a decoder for FREE from someone who had also got it for free, but wasn’t allowed to put a satellite on the house.  So now we will get AFN channels.  Yay!

John attempted to start putting together our entertainment system last night whilst I was cooking dinner.  He had a brand new 1000W transformer.  Twenty minutes later, he had surpassed the surge limit somehow and left the entire apartment without power.  Whoops.  The landlord downstairs still had power, however, so we didn’t think anything was seriously fried. 

The landlord wasn’t home at the time, so I packed up dinner (I had just started cooking pork marsala), put it in the fridge, and we walked to Ammerthaler Hof to get something to eat before they closed.  The food was delicious once again, and the beer so refreshing, I think I actually chugged mine at one point.

After we walked (shuffled) back home, pointing out constellations along the way, we ran into our landlord and he showed us what had happened with the surge breaker. It was reset, and we were on our way.  (To bed. It was late.)  Although we’re not quite sure how we are going to hook up the game systems along with our DVD and satellite receiver.  We haven’t tried the big transformer again.  Just our little 300 W one.  But that’s a problem for another day.  For now, we are just getting things settled and discovering how the packers did on wrapping up our items in Rock Island.  So far, there are only a few dings and one broken knick-knack that should be easy to repair.  We have yet to unwrap John’s grandma’s wedding china which was not repacked since we brought it back from South Dakota.  John’s mom is now convinced it will be destroyed since it was not repacked as it was only packed for that one driving trip, not an overseas move.  So we shall see if there was any damage.  I will be very sad if our oversight ruined this.  Of course, the moving company will be responsible, but replaced pieces aren’t as cool as the originals.

While unpacking all of my things, I couldn’t help but feel this is like Christmas!  And then I realize I already had all of this stuff.  But it’s still our stuff.  It’s ours. 

And it suddenly feels like we live here instead of feeling like we rented out a lodge on our weird vacation.  It’s starting to feel more like home.