February 28 - We are starting our housekeeping

Heinke and Gustl made yet another drive over to the house in Reinbek with us and more house furnishings. So this was the day we actually started our housekeeping in Germany. First we made an inventory of everything that had been left behind by Kim, who had moved out a month back.Kim had collected a box of old stuff to be sold at a flea market and we decided to use the dishes for eating and the collection of beer mugs for decorating some wooden beams in the kitchen. We found a old set of wooden shelves in the basement and moved that into the dressing room beside the main bedroom to act as our wardrobe. Kim, an artiste, had also left a couple of her older paintings lying around, so we dragged those upstairs and later hung them in the living room. This kind of functional and decorative “settling in” activity continued over the next few days and gradually we made the house feel like home.

That evening Monika fixed dinner in the kitchen while I chopped some wood for the evening fire—did I mention that the house had a nice fireplace? I’ve always wanted to have a fireplace in the house, but when we bought our last house we were strapped for cash and it was either the fireplace or the garage, and the garage won. But still I’ve had this unsatisfied longing for lounging beside a crackling fire and I leaped at the chance to build a fire indoors for a change. I was glad I had some practice chopping wood because the ax was awfully dull (think of an edge more like a quarter coin than a knife) and tended to bounce off the wood. Nevertheless I persevered and we had dinner in front of a roaring fire. An inefficient use of wood for heating, I suspect, but a lot of fun nonetheless!

Afterwards I started typing our trip journal on the laptop and Monika read a bit before we turned in early. We planned to take the train system over to Wedel, another suburb of Hamburg, the next day and do a Volksmarch there. We felt we would like to do some Volksmarching in this part of the world where it did, after all, originate, and we were excited because this would be only our second ever German Volksmarch! Would they have Bier (beer), Bratwurst (hotdogs), and Kuchen (cakes) like the one we took with Heinke and Gustl last year? Would they have the same medic sitting outside the ambulance smoking a cigarette like last time? We were just feverish with anticipation, which just goes to show that we really don’t get out much and were probably still suffering from jet lag.