March 3 - Making the House into a Home.

I needed more air pressure in my tires than I could get with small hand pump, so our first stop of the day was at Aldi’s where they were having a sale on bicycles and bicycle accessories, including air pumps. We also picked up a helmet for each of us, an emergency tool and tire repair kit, as well as some food items. Shopping for food in Germany has always struck me as being a pattern of buying food more often but in smaller quantities than in the U.S. We also fell into the pattern of shopping every day or at most every other day in Germany, whereas in the U.S. we shopped typically twice a week.

With the bigger pump I could finally pump up the tires of Uncle Hans Henning’s bike enough to support me, so we were finally ready to try a trip the a building warehouse where we hoped to find a lot of stuff on our list. Right away when we started out I could feel the bicycle seat was too low, so we stopped off at the bicycle shop that is just down the street and bought a longer seat post. Instead of having a standard size, the owner carefully measured the diameter of the old post and searched among a large assortment of posts of different sizes. Even after searching she couldn’t find an exact match, so she finally had to use a shim and make one that was slightly too small fit well enough for me to ride. That raised me up enough to pedal comfortably and away we went!

I hadn’t ridden a bike in several years and I was unsteady at first, but it came back to me just like, well, riding a bicycle! That was fortunate because the stretches of cobblestone streets and sand-covered brick sidewalks were rather unforgiving of mistakes. The stones and bumps for the curbs really require a bike with large tires and at least a seat with springs. Riding my old 10-speed with skinny high-pressure tires on this type of surface would have been a bone-jarring experience, but as it was I was fairly comfortable.

I was also trying to accommodate the cultural custom of actually stopping for a stoplight until the “Pedestrian walk” sign, a green-colored man, was lit. Unfortunately my habit riding a bicycle in the U.S. was rather more to carefully judge traffic velocities and then blast thru any large enough gaps in the traffic, and I got the feeling that was “verboten” in Germany. Things were complicated by the fact that the front hand brake of this bicycle was a piece of metal that pushed down quite ineffectively on the front tire. It produced a little drag and a lot of noise, but no real braking action. There was no rear hand brake, but rather the rear brake was a backpedal type of brake of the type that I haven’t used since I was kid. The net result of my impulsive style of riding and weak brakes was that I sometimes slid into the intersection even when I was trying to stop, earning puzzled looks from the German drivers.

The intersections with stoplights typically were equipped with a pedestrian switch to stop the automobile traffic, but it was mounted so low that I almost couldn’t reach it from the bicycle. So I found I had to swerve right up to the post, slap the switch, and hope that the light would change before I toppled over. I found out that if I stopped close enough to the post I could use it to prop myself up, so if I managed to stop for the intersection I would end up leaning against the post like a drunken sailor. This still earned puzzled looks from the German drivers, but it was safer than sliding into the traffic I suppose. The ride over to the builder’s market was, however, quite a bit more exciting than I either anticipated or wanted.

The builder’s market was simply called “Obi”, but it resembled nothing so much as a 1/3 scale Home Depot. We found a great deal on our list including the voltmeter. But we were quite frustrated in trying to find nuts to hold down the toilet seat. They had three different styles of mounting bolts in kits that I couldn’t unwrap, and these kits each belonged to different brands of toilet seats! I had brought one of the bolts with me, but I couldn’t unpack the kits to check the size, and we didn’t know what brand we had back at the house! Our Plan B was to try to find basic nuts and washers to fit those screws. The Obi store did have a large selection of nuts and bolts, but once again we were frustrated since the bolt seemed to be a size 7 and they only carried nuts for sizes 6 (too small) and size 8 (too big)! Totally frustrated, I decided just to ditch the old seat and buy a new one with mounting hardware at Aldi, where I knew they were only about 8 Euro or so.

Shopping in a foreign culture is, for me at least, a big source of “culture shock”. Almost everything is different, and some things are REALLY different. In this case, all the electrical things were completely different—they didn’t use any wire nuts to make connections, for example, but rather either screw or crimp connectors of a type completely unfamiliar to me. I found myself time and again wondering “What in the world is that?” or “What is that used for?” as I passed strange objects. Other things, like caulking guns, were exactly the same as in the U.S. but I couldn’t find a can of glazing putty or glazier’s points to save my life. We had to ask where they had the putty knifes, but finally did get one of those in case I had to do some spackling to cover some of the holes in the walls. I also couldn’t find a simple knife sharpening stone or carborundum stone altho I did find some electric bench grinders that would have worked if I was willing to pay the price (I wasn’t). It took a while, but we finally packed up and started on our way back to Reinbek.

The trip back, as is so often the case, seemed to be much faster than the trip out. Curiously enough, even though I was on a single speed bike and Monika had a seven speed, I seemed to be a bit faster again on the way back. In a sense that was a shame because I really wanted to have one of those nice aluminum comfort bikes like Aldi had on sale, but this way I saved a couple of hundred Euro so that was good. The helmets turned out to be easy to adjust and very comfortable, in fact nice and warm in the 40 degree temperatures.

After stowing the bikes, we hopped over to Aldi and bought the dratted toilet seat because I just didn’t want to slide off the toilet anymore. In fact, I started installing that seat while Monika fixed lunch, and when it was finally fastened down I felt relieved in more ways than one! The afternoon was occupied with hanging two of Kim’s old paintings in the living room, hanging a mirror in the entrance hall, and fooling around very carefully with electrical things. I found out when replacing the covers of the wall outlets that once again there was no standardization of the covers—the cover’s I bought at Aldi didn’t fit the covers I bought at another store, and neither of those fit the covers that were already in the house! I used the new covers to at least cover all the exposed wall outlets, and that plus the paintings made the living room look much more livable.

My final goal was to get an overhead light working in our room. Monika had found a nice one with a blue-swirled glass lampshade that we thought would blend in perfectly with the sky Kim had painted on the ceiling, so I spent a while attaching it to the ceiling and, after checking that the current was off, carefully wiring it up. I was so happy when we finally got it working, even if the dimmer didn’t seem to cooperate with the 40-watt bulb we had in the fixture. Still, when I pressed the switch, the light came on, and that was all I really wanted. As Ted used to say, I don’t have many standards, but that’s one of them!

The big lesson that came home to me with all this futzing around was the surprising lack of standardization in several aspects of German culture. The lack of standardization in bicycle seat tubes, light fixtures, electrical outlet covers, and connectors not to mention toilet seat mounting gear really did astonish me, and it made working on things extraordinarily difficult. I first had to guess how the thing was designed and then by guessing the intent of the designer I had to figure out how to do what I wanted to do. That’s a couple of steps involving more thinking than I would have to do with similar types of household tasks in the U.S. Maybe this just represents the diversity of European culture and the fact of products being available from all over the European Union, but I’m not sure.

So with paintings hung, toilet seats fixed, and at least some lights fixed, we relaxed for the evening with another nice fire. It was a bit like camping, but now the fire was inside with us! But we also had the bikes ready for any future wandering, and that was a comforting thought.