Kita visit & delayed start of preschool

Today we spent a couple of hours getting to know the kids' new preschool - they played on the playground while we talked (through a translator) to the teachers. Very cool place. Cody's teacher's name is Reinhart - he's probably about 65 with longer gray hair and a goatee wearing cut-off jeans.  Ines, a friendly motherly lady in her late 50s is Jasper's teacher.

 

Their classrooms are not next to one another, but very close and on the same floor. Their bathrooms (cuz each class has their own bathroom!) are adjoining.

 

When we arrived, the other kids were playing in sand/water/mud when and most were nearly naked - getting changed back into their "dry" clothes. It seems to be standard operating procedure to strip kids down to their undies to play in water at parks even, so no surprise to do that in the privacy of the preschool. Note to self: make sure kids wear their good undies on hot days when water play is expected.

However, we’ve run into a snafu. Jasper & Cody need to get a medical check before the director will allow them to start – it’s some sort of state regulation now (wish they had told us this last week!). Unfortunately that means that they are not able to start school tomorrow and do a slow integration with us this week as we had planned. It’s being pushed out. I've told my bosses and the HR lady here in Berlin that I'm delayed starting work. Hope they'll still pay me!

Wall Remnants Visit

Bernauer Street was one of the more famous sections of the Berlin Wall since the structure incorporated many of the buildings into its aspect. So for a time you had people able to escape to the West by jumping through their friend's bedroom windows. Eventually the Stasi (Soviet/East German secret police) got wise to this and bricked up the windows of these buildings with facades that faced Bernauer Strasse. In time they demolished all these buildings to create a wider field of vision that would make it easier to shoot escapees. 

The re-united city of Berlin poured a bunch of money into keeping certain sections of the Wall still standing as a memorial to the hundred or so people who perished trying to cross it between 1961 and 1989. Bernauer Strasse is one of the larger pieces of this effort. The Wall itself stands as it did and outlines of original building foundations are tracked in the ground. A continuation of the wall in the form of rusted poles spaced wide enough to pass through picks up where the former concrete leaves off, enabling a fairly decent mental picture of the no-man's land that characterized this ground.

The kids roll around in the former kill zone:

Those who perished trying to cross got their own memorial, with the Wall remnants standing in the background.

Building facades that overlook the open ground have murals and period pictures that make for a running historical commentary on the events of that actual spot.

When we had truly soaked up Bernauer, it was back to the trains. We bought the kids little cars (Jasper's was an East German Police Car "Trabant" and Cody's was a Double Decker bus of the type that prowl the tourist trail between the Brandenburg Gate and the Eastside Wall gallery). Here they are racing them around the S-Bahn window sills.

Walk thru of our new digs.

We are renting an AirBnB apartment for a few weeks until we can move into the longer term place we signed a lease on. Today we went over to check it out and chit chat with owners Petria and Veit, who are leaving for Wash DC for a 2 year stint. He is a journalist for German magazine Der Spiegel and will be covering the US election. Here are some shots of our soon to be new home!

View from the balcony:

Living Room:

Study:

Study:

Study view 3:

Master:

Kid's:

Armoir. And stylish guy living inside it.

Hallway:

Kitchen 1:

Kitchen 2: He's leaving his super high end espresso maker, Thank The Saints!

Berlin Explorations week 1: Playgrounds

The first thing you do with kids in Berlin is hit the playgrounds, which thankfully exist every 3.5 yards. Kids are ecstatic at the prospects. Happy kids, happy life.

Medieval castle playground with guard towers, catwalks and dungeon. Completely impressive.

Germans love ziplines, so nearly every big park has one. Kids enjoy riding double on these things. Hang on Cody!

Fountain at AlexanderPlatz, the big-ass square in the former East Berlin where all the big parades and action went down.

Kids are U-Bahn experts after just a couple days. Actually, they aren't really experts, if left alone on the Berlin subway system they'd soon be irretrievably lost. BUT they can press the right buttons on the ticket machine, the train door to exit, and recognize the wall colors of "our" stop at Bayerischer Platz.

The first few days

Flight:
Condor Airlines, who I had not previously heard of, rocked it. Premium Economy class tickets give you extra leg room and some meal benefits. Extra legroom comes in handy when 1/2 way thru a 9 hour flight your fidgeting child wants to play on the floor.

The plane was a 2-3-2 configuration and we had the three middle seats in a row, with one seat in the row forward of it. The extra seat was kind of like the "parent rest" seat. I took it for the first three hours while Cassandra handled games and the meal, then we switched for the "rest" part of the trip. Children failed to rest until the final two hours of the flight. Jasper was chill even when not resting, while Cody was fidget-mania. Lots of climbing in and out of lap. No desire to lay down and be quiet. So he and Daddy were up until effectively 4 am Seattle time. Not helping was the Japanese guy next to us who had his window shade open the entire time (when all cabin lights are dimmed and every other window shade was down) as he took pictures out the window into the blinding sunlight.

Cody was fast asleep and required getting awakened for the descent into Frankfurt so he could sit up for landing. Stewardesses were adamant about this point. This created sustained howling.

For descent into Berlin, Cody suddenly announced a dire need for a bathroom break. Stewardesses were all seated and the landing is like 3 minutes away so too late to actually make it to the bathroom. Yet do you want a child with soaked pants dripping pee all over you, the seat and any German unlucky enough to be sitting nearby? Thinking quickly, Cassandra unscrewed the lid of Cody's water thermos, stood him up in front of his seat, and had him fill 'er up while the plane was landing. "we'll sterilize that later," she quipped.

Berlin:
The baggage claim greets you at the end of the jet bridge, so the delay is barely a minute before you get your bags and can start annoying stern airport officials with taking your "we arrived" pictures. A friend sent a van for us and we packed everything in for a drive south through the city to our AirBnB in the Schoneberg neighborhood. 

We unload our stuff in a massive mountain of nylon duffels, bike boxes and backpacks in front of our new home for the nex three weeks until the actual apartment lease begins. We are waiting for the owner to show up to let us in. Cody again decides it is time to drain the main vein, so whips it out and begins watering the decorative bushes at the entrance to the building. Our backs were turned. When we saw this outrage we ran over to cluster around him in the hopes that none of the numerous passers-by would notice a small white butt and a stream of liquid squirting on bushes. We tried to rationalize that we were not parent failures for creating a child capable of such abomination of manners. 

Parks:
Walk any direction in this city for 10 minutes and you are bound to hit a park. Not just any type of park, but kids parks. (Kinderspielplatz!) And most of these kid parks have play/climbing/swinging structures that are the envy of the first world. Our kids have been treated to massive, two-storey medieval castles, long distance zip lines, cable-web nets extending 30 feet into the air and something made of hundreds of pieces of rubber sheeting fastened together into a tree house of sorts that I cannot possibly describe. We've been taking the subway (U-Bahn) around the city to run admin errands and have sampled a pile of parks in two days. Kids will have plenty to do here from a parks standpoint.

Razorfish Office:
One of the errands was to go and get paperwork signed/meet people at the Razorfish office. It is located next to the East Side Gallery, the longest section of the wall that is still standing. Office is bright and modern, yet housed in a century-old warehouse building that pre-WWII supplied merchant shipping along the Spree, the main river running through Berlin. People were apologetic that it has no air conditioning, which in high summer becomes a bit of an issue. So I guess it isn't all that modern. Everyone was overly excited to have us there, and several were mystified at why we would uproot our entire lives to come and work there like this. People love it when you move to their country, but many cannot comprehend doing that in reverse, which potentially makes them wonder what the hell is wrong with us.

Tomorrow we go to see the apartment for the first time and get coffee with Ilona, our steadfast relocation agent. I have yet to replace my mobile phone and am getting used to the concept of having no phone at all. Eventually I will get one through work, but with the bureaucracy and approvers' vacation schedules, it'll be weeks. I don't mind, it is a good exercise.

Landed in Berlin

Goodbye Greenwood!

Last night in the US..

Chilling at the condo

Closing up shop

Making Movies

If our last time through this was any indication, "Going Expat" turns your life into a movie. It is one of the great reasons to do something like this: who doesn't want to turn their lives into a movie for awhile? There is something about living in a different place makes you slightly more romantic, dangerous and wiley than you typically would think about yourself while heating up lunch leftovers in the office kitchen.

One of by-products of leaping into an adventure like this is that the general perceived gravity of your life experience suddenly explodes. Common occurrences like jet planes streaking overhead become movie-moments: a plane represents a key component to this impending life change. If you are me, this requires staring squinty eyed at it, with the sun slanting across your face, as you contemplate the precipice you are about to drive over. If done from the middle of a Safeway parking lot while holding a bag of groceries, all the better. The gravity of the moment will be deeply apparent to all in close proximity to you, the Real Change guy and others carrying bags of chicken breasts and toilet paper, and all will likely look up as well to be swept away with the moment.

So I've been spending lots of time getting weepy about my neighborhood "it's...SO...BEAUTIFUL!" and everyday things that I know I will miss, such as peanut butter and Macrina blueberry scones. This is what some movie roles demand: sacrifice and hardship. 

But, being a movie star, I get this. I'm fine this giving some things up.

Little shredders

Closing down the embassy

Before..after

Before

Aftermath of work's send off happy hour at Buckleys.

Kerry Park. Seattle and Mount Rainier dropping the mic on NW scenery.

Cleaning out the kitchen

11:54 pm on our last night in the house

Moving progress.

But the garage still needs some love

Weekend moving progress

Loading truck. Playing in truck. Falling out of truck.