It was the kind of month that will bring you happiness when you review it later, flat on your back and breathing through a respirator, whilst lying on your death bed. You'll know it is all over for you at that point, and you will wonder if you made enough of your life. Then June 2017 will flit across your consciousness and you'll think "Ok Life, I sure squeezed the hell out of that orange."
Stage 1: A New Flat and Cody's Scholastic Future.
Whenever you mention that you must move to friends in Berlin, people immediately start stressing out for you. Moving here is not treated lightly. The first thing anyone says after learning you must change flats is: "I'm sorry."
We had advance notice that we'd need to be out in June, so we started looking in February. The dynamic of flat availabilities is hard in that most people don't list their flat 4-5 months out, they do it one month out since it is usually quite easy to find renters. This prevents much advance work unless you want to double pay for multiple months. Also, our Schöneberg neighborhood has gotten more popular, along with the rest of Berlin, since we appeared in 2015.
The last dynamic is that we were predominately looking for furnished places since we left or sold all the furniture in Seattle before coming. There is a market for furnished apartments but the inventory is limited.
We kept going on "Besichtigungen" (showings) and gaining a good feel for the types of apartments available in our neighborhood. Mostly the furnished ones were too small and the unfurnished ones would require an immediate investment in furniture which implies a longer term commitment to this Berlin venture. Ideally you aren't buying a bunch of stuff and then turning around and leaving since it means you must now sell everything that you'll likely just settled into. This "timing" idea was a conversation we had not broached yet at any rate.
As April turned into May friends began getting more and more surprised/concerned that we hadn't closed on our next place yet. We were too, but we kept waiting "one more week" for a deluge of new inventory to come online. This deluge never came in more than dribbles. Finally we opened it up to unfurnished places and saw a number of cool spots that we knew would take a year of nesting work just to get it perfect. One of the first places we looked at started seeming better and better since it came with a kitchen (many German apartments don't - people take their kitchens with them) and a fitted master bedroom plus a few big closets the owner would leave for us if we wanted them.
The biggest advantage was its proximity to the Grundschule for the kids - it was barely a block and half from Nelson Mandela International School. This meant kids could practically walk themselves there and we wouldn't have to deal with getting Cody to ride his bike across town to school in the mornings. Jasper, being older, took to this practice pretty easily. But Cody would enter Grundschule a full year and a half younger than Jasper did, and well, certain things are just not as easy with him. Winter mornings riding a mile to school would be one of those things. With this flat we'd have that entire thing taken off the table.
Initially I wasn't happy with this flat because it seemed dim and dingy on the Besichtigung, it was not on a "cafe street," not really that close to grocery stores, and out of the price range for not being a fully-furnished place. But four months later they still hadn't rented it and when a serious prospect fell through for them the owner dropped the price and gave us 1/2 of June for free if we would sign. So the first week of June we decided to do it since time was now quite short.
Two days after we signed the paperwork we found out that Cody was not going to be able to attend the school two blocks away. He would attend the OTHER Nelson Mandela school campus, located a mile in the other direction. Furious rounds of negotiating and fact-finding ensued, with Cassandra taking lots of time off work to chase down school administrators and check in with other moms in the same situation. In the end we have the option to hire a lawyer and try to sue the Berlin City Senate, who manages school affairs. Thinking did not get very far along on this because we then met Nanny and Poppy and took of for our scheduled week-long trip to Poland during Jasper's school break.
Stage Two: Time in Poland with Nanny and Poppy.
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| Main square, Wroclaw. |
The meals in Poland struck me. We kept having epic meal experiences. I wonder if part of this was due to the fact that it was Poland, which is a place I never really expected to go. When you are suddenly exposed to a place you never thought you'd be, suddenly everything seems memorable. Luckily, Nanny and Poppy decided to include us in a trip they were planning for some ancestry research, so we had a wonderful opportunity to spend some time together while exploring a fascinating and beautiful country.
The most interesting meal was Konspira in Wrocław. And it wasn't exactly for the food, but for the setting. In short, Konspira is a monument to the 1980's Solidarity movement that originated in the Gdansk shipyards. It also extended to Wrocław and other Polish cities. The restaurant is full of memorabilia from that era, featuring riot police shields, tear gas canisters and leaflets tacked to the brick walls. Wall sconces are made out of old Communist riot police helmets. The best part is the "secret" room that you enter through a fake door in a large bookcase.
While Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and the dockworker unions of Gdansk didn't end Communism in Poland, they helped undermine it and prep the way for the opening after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We sat around that low table and ordered stout Polish food: potatoes, ham shanks, beet salads, local Pilseners, while staring at the pictures of Soviet tanks in the city streets, kids throwing rocks in demonstrations and burning trucks. Talismans of underground resistance against an authoritarian regime. "Freedom" fighters against the Communist government.
It reminded me of a similar place we'd seen in other travels, namely a spot called "El Rincón de las Canallas" ("Scoundrel's Corner") in Santiago, Chile. El Rincón was a speakeasy place you access through a door with a peephole by saying the password. During the Pinochet dictatorship, resistance members gathered here in order to write and print leaflets, hold meetings, plan demonstrations.
Like the ones in Wrocław, during exactly the same time period, they were also resisting an authoritarian regime. However they were on the other side - they were Leftists on the run from Pinochet's right-wing death squads.
So the irony struck me. Resistance groups whether you are on the right or left have their shrines, and when you walk into one they feel exactly the same.
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| Few places East of Berlin were untouched by the fierce Soviet-German battles of 1941-45. Wroclaw was besieged, wrecked and flattened but actually held out longer than Berlin did. |
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| Wroclaw, on the way to Konspira |
Poland SubStage: Streptoccocyl
Cody came down with it first, requiring a visit to the hospital in Wrocław in an attempt to find someone who could give us antibiotics. These are not available over the counter, so we needed a doctor's note. We found a hospital on the map and had various charade conversations with Poles who were nice but who either didn't speak English OR German, or who did not know answers to our questions such as "Where is the patient check-in?"
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| Apparently the emergency room. We'll start there? |
At length we walked down a truck delivery alley in the direction of some doors that one person indicated could be the emergency room. The hallway was dimly-lit, as one would expect, with people lying on geurnseys with IV bags. One large gentleman had hiked his shirt up to his chest and was giving himself what looked like an insulin shot in his huge belly. Others sat on chairs with predictably forlorn expressions on their faces.
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| This was Cody's second hospital of the morning. |
Cody was feverish and shaking, so we scouted around for a blanket. This was unsuccessful, so Cassandra put in "My child has a fever and needs a blanket" into Google translate and then I showed the Polish translation to a nurse. This got a reaction and Cody was awarded his blanket! The two techs we worked with had decent English, so this helped in one regard. They said Cody was suffering from a Throat Angina. But since we had come to the wrong hospital (children's was across town apparently) they wanted to send Cody in the Ambulance over there to get the antibiotics. We politely declined that offer and took him there ourselves.
We knew that he just needed the drugs to start feeling better, so the whole circus was basically 5 hours to get to a piece of paper that we could take to a pharmacy. This finally resolved itself and by that night Cody was back to his energetic self.
Two days later we did the same drill when Jasper came down with it. This time it was in Zakopane, the second city of our Polish trip. We identified it quickly and just started giving him Cody's medicine to catch it early, then the next day went and did the hospital tour again. Being a smaller town, the children's clinic was right next to the main hospital so this helped immensely. Doctor guy who finally saw him also spoke English, so Strep #2 went much quicker that the first one. When we finally got to people to talk to, we could just produce our German health insurance card, and then everything paperwork-oriented goes on greased skids from there. Yay for the EU agreements.
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| The second word has something to do with Medicine..! |
Jay has a huge bike race coming up the Sunday after getting back from Poland (the day after the movers come) and to try and stay fit he managed a long ride out of Zakopane over the Slovak border and looped around the mountains.
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| Border selfie. |
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| The crumbling customs post on the Slovak border. |
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| Slovak Republic's Tatra Mountains. |
Because they are saints, Nanny and Poppy took the kids up to Cracow a day early from Zakopane so Cassandra and I would get a "date night." We bundled the kids up with their travel duffels, stuffed animals and antibiotics and off the happy crew went to Cracow. They left Cassandra and I on the side of a forest roadway near a trailhead with our backpacks and hiking poles.
We did 13 miles up to a small tarn underneath craggy peaks, saw a Chamois traversing a snowfield, and then worked our way back down to town where Cassandra had expertly reserved an AirBnB quite near our trail outlet. The next morning we did another ridge hike and emerged at the base of the main cable car that runs up the highest peak in the area. A quick ride on a mini bus got us back to town where we found the bus station for the trip up to Cracow.
The next day Poppy and I went to Auschwitz, located in the forests about an hour outside of Cracow. Extremely well done. Nothing is held back. Lots of the barracks are still standing and have been made into museums focusing on particular aspects of the camps. Most poignant:
- The piles of prisoner's shoes. A massive clump of brown, it is 10 feet tall and extends the length of the building's wing, probably 200 feet. The long pile is glassed-in and visitors walk by it staring at the people's shoes. Other galleries featured personal effects in similar volumes (cookery, suitcases, shaving gear).
- The forlorn forest of chimneys of disintegrated prisoner barracks at Birkenau, the sister camp to Auschwitz. At this camp a few miles from Auschwitz much of the buildings are gone but their brick chimneys remain. Standing there in the middle of that huge field full of such remnants it becomes clear to you in ways you never could have imagined the true scale of these things.
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| The fence at Birkenau. |
Suddenly, convincing Cody to bike a mile on a Berlin winter morning does not seem like that big of a deal.
Poland finished with a couple days in Cracow, a beautifully - restored city with the requisite cobblestone alleys, cathedrals and bridges. Most of these cities play up their medieval ruins since this is what people like to see. Most cities had some sort of a wall for protection, and those wall blocks make attractive backdrops for garden restaurants, symphony concerts and temporary art exhibits.
Cracow has one of the few remaining Barbicans, a defensive structure involving a moat, archer galleries and overlook towers. Carcassone in France's Burgundy region is the other. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, so we paid our ticket price and explored the heck out of every inch.
Always with these sites there are super steep stairways up to lookouts and turrets, which the kids love and the adults are gradually becoming tired with. But it affords you the opportunity to stand where someone was aiming his crossbow at attackers 600 years ago, and that is worth it, right? (Jay = yes. Cassandra = no.)
HUGE THANKS to Nanny and Poppy for this trip. Another one for the history books for sure!
We arrived back in Berlin on Friday and the next day we moved flats.
Stage Three: Moving.
Most of "Umzug Tag" (moving day) for us was frantic packing of the remaining junk that did not easily fit in with the other, larger, piles of junk. The morning was spent by Jay flexing his muscles as a car interior bodywork man, as he replaced the inner roof on a friend's VW Transporter van that we had punched a big hole in while using it to move a couch the week before. I now have knowledge of disconnecting dome lights, utilization of roof plate fasteners and where you go in Berlin to special order specific parts for VW vehicles. (It is on Grenzallee in the furthest reaches of the gritty Neukölln neighborhood).
The kids had a friend's birthday party to attend that miraculously went all afternoon so Cass and I could pack and pack. Finally at 4pm there was nothing else to do except await the moving van, so we went down to the Cuban rum joint across the street from our flat and ordered a mojito. It was the kind of thing we've said repeatedly that we would do ever since we moved in and just never did it. Well dammit today we did it, and those mojitos tasted delicious.
As we paid, the white moving van pulled up and then the rest of the afternoon went downhill.
Why downhill? The movers were not happy about the 4th floor walk-up, even though we told them about it in advance. They also felt we drastically under-estimated the amount of stuff we had. Finally, they refused to take anything that wasn't either on the list we registered OR in regulation size moving boxes with freely-accessible carrying handles. We did have a number of those, but we also had our stuff in different-sized boxes. They wouldn't take that stuff.
The mover guys were Turkish and spoke no German. The Boss spoke German but no English. He was in a crappy mood and preferred to just yell at us for having too much stuff. Much of this was the fault of the sales guy when we made the initial order, who did not mention the fact that there is only ONE size of box that can be used.
Too late for quibbling around such detail though! They managed to pack about half of our pile into their van and left the rest for us, which we took care of after work for three consecutive days using a car share.
Fun Things:
- Jay so tired he took a shower in the open bathtub using the hand-held sprayer instead of in the actual shower stall located four feet away from the bathtub. Disoriented and punch-drunk from the low sleep and stress of the move, he somehow failed to notice the presence of a shower stall in the new bathroom. Later on, it was noticed.
- We fear and despise our new washing machine. On spin cycle it will actively lurch across the room, banging loudly on the floor and threatening to punch a huge hole in the wall if left to go on its own. Whenever we do a wash load, we must all (whole family) race into the bathroom and drape ourselves across it to keep it in one place. It is a spectacular scene: all four of us clinging desperately onto the machine, shouting at each other over the din to "HOLD ON! JUST HOLD ON!!" until the spin cycle ends. So laundry is a challenge.
- We have bought a bunch of IKEA bookshelves, couches and dressers. We are IKEA construction experts and have the towering sheets of cardboard and Allan wrenches to prove it.
- Sunday morning after the move disaster I was doing a major bike race (120km) around Berlin and outskirts. It is a huge event where they close down major city streets for thousands of competitors. We were supposed to have all the move taken care of by mid-June, so when I signed up for the race back in January it did not seem ridiculous on the timing. Anyway Sunday morning I appear at the race registration to pick up my number and learn that I should have come by the night before to confirm my registration. I didn't do this as I was dealing with the moving company idiots. So they gave away my race number. I pedalled sadly back home and spent the day doing more responsible things like packing boxes and helping my family move, one load of a car-share Mini Clubman at a time.
- Later on we discovered the shaking washing machine was due to us not unscrewing the shipment restraining bolts for the internal drum. Now it works much better.
Stage Four: Work Uncertainty.
Our company is in the midst of merging with another firm, both of which are part of a larger umbrella organization. This other company is called Sapient. It is a consulting firm. It is roughly similar to Razorfish except brings different methods of accounting for projects and work culture. Razorfish was more on the creative side of things, partially why they thought it would be a good idea to merge the two since Sapient had no experience in that advertising area.
Sapient was the stronger partner of the two, so their "way" has been forced onto all the Razorfish people. You can't run a creative organization like a business consultancy due to the types of projects and people who are needed. The accounting is different, the sales process is different, and the project lengths are typically much shorter, which screws up the accounting process.
As a result, since Sapient doesn't get the whole creative agency concept, they start running it like a consultancy. Creatives don't do well with this. Also many of the Razorfish execs were steadily forced out to make way for Sapient people. Since the job market in Berlin is extremely good right now, the Razorfish office has largely emptied out. People are leaving even without jobs. The old Razorfish is pretty much gone, and the few hold-outs are really a sad skeleton crew of what this was when we started just two years ago. To the day.
Anyway, my team, the "Business Intelligence & Analytics" group, has also be affected by this. I'm the only one left on the team. There's been no leadership on where I should go, who I report to, what I should actually do. It is kind of a "choose your own adventure" of the workplace. Of course it represents a big opportunity. One guy told me that he thought it would be awhile before anything gets sorted out and sincerely hoped I was fine with ambiguity. Luckily I am.
Stage Five: The Holy Land
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| The Western Wall, Jerusalem. Wooden structure is a tourist bridge to the Temple Mount, but it was closed today for a Muslim holiday. |
On Friday morning, 23 June we left the piles of still-unopened boxes and half-finished furniture construction projects behind and reported to Tegel airport to go to Israel for four days to attend a friend's wedding and try to do some sight-seeing. We arrived to a scene of utter chaos at the Air Berlin check-in for Tel Aviv. Tons of people pushing forward. Lots of shouting in Hebrew. Mascara running down faces from people crying. Whoa, I think, ok this is what travel in the Middle East is going to be all about. What, we wonder, could possibly have happened!
Eventually we reach the desk and hear the story: lightning storms the night before diverted traffic and forced them to cancel the night flight. Then they overbooked the morning flight and could only find a smaller airplane for it. So we waited three hours to find out we'd been bumped. More waiting and watching and finally I got us booked on the following morning's flight. Back home to spend the day unpacking.
Saturday morning, 24 June, we made it to Israel. Three and a half hours to Tel Aviv.
It's not really a place that lends itself to word descriptions, so here are the pics with commentaries:
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| Capering along the jetty in Tel Aviv the first night. |
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| Sand Castling the Med. |
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| Street falafel, pita and hummous in Tel Aviv. |
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| Structure within the church of the Holy Sepulchre that houses "The Cave." |
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| Jerusalem's Old City: everything is is Hebrew, Arabic and English. The stones are ancient and hung with air conditioners and security cameras. |
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| Unlike Germany, Israelis are big flag-wavers. |
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| Jerusalem market with Arab street art. |
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| Yamuca central. |
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| Cody hits the Western Wall to mingle with the Rabbis, IDF soldiers and assorted pilgrims. |
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| Tel Aviv hotel one-way mirror. I think the work out room was right behind this. |
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| Travelling with your crazy parents can be exhausting! |
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| Kibbutz Beit Guvrin wedding site. |
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| Victoria's Wedding in a sandstone quarry at Kibbutz Beit Guvrin. We looked at a map afterwards and realized we were only about 20 miles from the Gaza Strip. |
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| There were party favors to be scrounged. |
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| Jaffa park. |
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| Cody wards off heatstroke in ancient Jaffa. |
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| Old town Jaffa. I loved exploring the little alleyways around those walls! |
Stage Six: Flooding in Berlin
Torrential rains on Thursday afternoon, June 29. With videos online of U-Bahn station stairs turning into waterfalls and cars pushing through fender-deep water, we were treated to the longest sustained deluge of our time in Berlin. A quarter of the year's typical total fell in an 18 hour period, making it one of the larger storms in the century, apparently.
From the office, first we ran across the Oberbaumbrücke to Schlesisches Tor UBahn station, where they were herding everyone on busses due to a massive train track replacement project which has stopped train service for weeks. The busses are supposed to replace the train, but they go much slower since they must fight traffic. Also they must fight clueless delivery trucks and taxis who routinely park in the bus lane.
Bus takes us agonizingly slowly down four stops to Hallesches Tor. Now we know how late we are going to be in picking up the kids. German caregivers have little tolerance for such irresponsibility. My stomach is queasy for the tongue lashing we will deserve for this.
We run from Hallesches to the DriveNow car share that Cassandra reserved. Unfortunately this is still two long blocks, and in the downpour we are soaked. As in, water running down our backs and out of the bottom of rain jacket sleeves. Shoes so soggy you stop trying to avoid sloshing through the ankle-deep puddles in your way. This kind of wet.
We get in the car and then instantly join Berlin's largest traffic mess of the year. Intersections are all gridlocked and underwater as the storm drains overflow. We inch forward across the city. We're now over 30 minutes late to pickups for both kids. Jay can't take the traffic jams any longer and jumps out a kilometer away from the kita and then runs splashing across Schöneberg to get Cody. Miraculously the teacher is cool with this. Well, of course she still thinks we are clueless imbeciles, but at least she doesn't scold me there in my dripping wet jeans.
Magically in our neighborhood the traffic lessens, so we make decent time over to NMS to pick up the second kid. Just 45 minutes late for that one! Cassandra takes the teacher to the S-Bahn line she needs to go home. She feels bad because it appears that the streets are not crowded - the teacher is probably thinking that we made it all up.
Luckily a whole string of U-Bahn stations are closed that night since they are practically underwater so our story holds true. UN-luckily our basement floods and our downstairs storage unit becomes swampified under an inch of water, soaking moving boxes and suitcase that we have starting stacking down there. Jay adds another thing to the "to-do" list: Install a rubberized water barrier around our entire unit so this never happens again.
The next day, the last merciful day of June, Jay travelled across Germany to the city of Cologne for the company summer party. It was mostly Sapient people from the Cologne and Frankfurt offices, but a good place to network. I was going to take the U-Bahn to the Hauptbahnhof but the line nearest us (U9) was closed since several stations were flooded out. I grabbed a cab and had an interesting conversation with the driver who had seen Kennedy at the Schöneberg Rathaus in '63.
The ragtag group of Razorfish people left the Haptbahnhof on the speedy ICE train at 11:30 for the four hour trip across Germany. We met at the Sapient offices then proceeded on company-provided busses to an abandoned industrial site that has been turned into a super-schwanky club area. There was great food, a fun band and people generally stayed until 3 am since that's what you do. I came home at 11:30 and walked around the Domplatz, checking out the cathedral. It is one of the most recognizable ones in Germany because it is huge and somehow escaped getting bombed in WWII.
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| Co-workers Thomas (French) and Malou (German). |
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| The Kölner Dom. |
During my summer trip here as a student in 1990 I came through Cologne three separate times, so it was another memory-spot to check off the list. So June ended while I was wandering around the HohenzollernBrücke over the Rhine River watching the kids getting drunk and people strolling around.
We're all looking forward to a relaxing July, and more meals on our new deck, like this:
PHEW!
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