March 1 - Settling in

We awakened to a beautiful sunrise shining in thru dirty windows, so the first order of business after breakfast was to clean windows all around the house. Aunt Size’s old house is remarkable for having huge rows of windows on several sides, somewhat in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright. They’re beautiful, but they do have to be cleaned and I expect they make the house a real heat sink in winter since some of the oldest windows are still single-pane. In general, the concrete and plaster walls of the house appear to have no insulation at all, and the solid masonry walls conduct heat rather efficiently from inside to the Great Outdoors! On the plus side, it would be hard for a house like that to burn down!

Some people feel naked without their clothes; I feel naked without my tools. That might explain why I was so anxious to get back to Aldi and by a hammer drill that I had seen on sale there. I’d already stocked up last Saturday with the combination wrenches, screwdriver assortment, and socket-screwdriver set I found there for about 6 Euro each (cheap!), but I had deferred buying the hammer drill because I wasn’t sure I really needed one. But the masonry walls of German houses really require a hammer drill to make any holes in the concrete, and the walls were bare so we had decided we would decorate a bit. This gave me a really good excuse to buy a hammer drill at last (I’ve wanted one for years—after all, you never know when you might have to drill into concrete!).

I was worried that the drills would be sold out or taken back off the market because the new monthly sales were starting, so I decided to put off working on Uncle Hans-Henning’s bicycle and visit Aldi’s before lunch. While Monika shopped I carefully considered whether to get the 850-watt 25 Euro model that was cheap but had fewer bits and attachments or the 900-watt 35 Euro model that was more expensive but also more powerful. Rationally, I preferred the more expensive model because it had a drill chuck that I could clearly see how to use for normal bits. Less rationally I was drawn to it because of, as they used to say on Tool Time, “More Power!” (When I get around tools, rationality is definitely a sometimes thing.). When I explained my dilemma fortunately Monika was OK with the extra 10 Euro so we purchased the 900-watt model. Boy did I have fun trying it out back at the house!

I also used the rest of the hand tools I’d purchased while reconditioning Uncle Hans-Henning’s old bicycle that afternoon. After sitting in the basement for the last 20-30 years after he died, I figured the tires and inner tubes would be rotten, so we walked two blocks down the street to a local bicycle shop to buy some new ones. I always have enjoyed working on bicycles, so this was fun as well as being part of my strategic plan to extend our range of operations. Everything on a bicycle sits out there in the open, just begging to be tightened, oiled, or adjusted in some way. I was happy to oblige and I found that the skills came back to me as I worked, almost like riding a bicycle! I even remembered to use talcum powder on the inner tubes so that they wouldn’t pinch—Monika donated her powder to make that possible.

Unfortunately it was snowing by the time I finished a couple of hours later, so rather than take it out for a test drive I took a nap—we seemed to be shifting our biorhythm clocks, but rather gradually. The first couple of nights I awakened at midnight, the next couple of nights about 2-3 a.m., so things were slowly improving. I was sincerely trying to convince my body to get onto the German time zone because there’s nothing more boring than lying in bed, wide-awake, at some ungodly hour of the morning.

I used what would be otherwise wasted time in the middle of the night to do strategic planning about how to proceed with this vacation. Unlike other Wanderungs where we were constantly traveling, the focus now was staying in Hamburg and exploring the Schleswig Holstein area really well. Having a house was a big change, and it brought with it a unique set of issues like what was the minimum amount of furniture we really needed to live comfortably and what other things were necessary to make living fun. I hadn’t really thought of washing windows, for example, but that turned out to be so irritating that we bought the cleaner and spent over an hour cleaning them. Who knew?

This Wanderung was also different because we were trying to live without a car for the first time since our days in graduate school. For anyone from the U.S. where the automobile is an essential part of life, that change to car-less-ness could be quite a wrench. Part of our plan was to buy long-term tickets for the transportation network, and we had already put that part into action by purchasing “CC Karten” as we passed back thru Hauptbahnhof on Sunday afternoon. The CC Karten were good for the month of March and allowed us travel throughout the greater Hamburg area everyday except Mondays thru Fridays before 9 a.m. and between 4 and 6 p.m. The rationale for that was that we were travelling only in the off-peak hours so our tickets cost only 39 Euro. We figured that if we took only 7 trips we would come out ahead, and we were pretty certain we’d be traveling at least that much.

But the CC Karten didn’t help us with getting around the area around Reinbek that much. Since carrying heavy or bulky things while walking quickly becomes tiresome, I figured we really needed bicycles to help us with local transportation. A big plus is that Germany is “bicycle friendly”. An awful lot of folks are using bicycles for transportation, shopping, and other daily tasks, so there are bike paths everywhere and auto drivers are used to watching for bikes, making it a whole lot safer than the U.S. We also could take bikes on the train/subway network and some, but not all, busses. So I figured that if I could fix up Uncle Hans-Hennings bike, we just had to find one for Monika and we’d be set.

Set for what? Well, by this time we had accumulated quite a healthy list of things we either needed or thought we needed. It reminded me of outfitting the camping trailer we bought in Wanderung 4—there always seemed to be “just one thing more” to get. On this day, for example, our list read something like this: another 220volt-120volt adapter plug, WD-40 for rusty bicycle bolts, TV antenna, , night light, potato and mushroom brushes, a slotted spoon, waste baskets, a picture hangar and wire to hang Kimi’s paintings, and a AA battery for the radio-set clock. For electric work like ceiling installing lights or cover plates on the wall outlets, I really wanted a voltmeter to avoid killing myself plus connectors, and outlet covers.

Last, but certainly not least, I was hoping to get a sharpening stone for the ax and some fireplace tongs. Aunt Size’s old house had this huge fireplace in the middle of the living room, and it was just so nice to relax in front of the fire with dinner, the computer, or a good book that I decided to build fires every night I could. My experience building fires in the wild, so to speak, turned out to help me here. As long as I remembered to shift the fireplace damper to “open”, it was a whole lot easier to build a fire in the warmth and calm air of the living room than it ever was in our campgrounds!

Sitting in front of the fire that evening, we caught the German version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”, and that was easy for me to follow because I knew the format from U.S. television. Besides the news, we also caught a summary of the 50 movies that had accumulated the most patronage in German theaters. Many of these “top 50” movies were foreign hits including Love Story, Papillon, Babe the pig, Titanic, Herbie, Home Alone, Pretty Woman, Harry Potter, Men In Black, Forest Gump, James Bond, The Flintstones, Rain Man, E.T., and The Lord of the Rings. As you can see, it was an eclectic list! However, some movies were entirely German including Asterix Erobert Rome(Asterix Conquers Rome) about a pair of comic book heroes during Roman times. The Asterix and Pollux comics are great reading, by the way, if you ever want to learn German and have a childlike sense of humor. Another “top 50” German flick featured a comic named Otto who seemed to be a kind of combination of the miming talent of Marcell Marceau with some of the verbal talent of Robin Williams. Last but not least, the Disney flicks were also well represented in the “top 50” list including “Finding Nemo”, “The Lion King”, “Aladdin”, and the all-time number 1 movie for German viewers, “The Jungle Book”. I would be very interested to see a similar list of the top 50 movies for the U.S. and then look for the similarities and differences between this aspect of the two cultures. Maybe I’ll have the time to do that when I retire. Oh wait, I am retired. Hey, can anybody else out there find the time to do this? And so to bed.