Moving Update

Am over at my friend's, D's, place and using her computer, that's why the update in such a short period of time.

Both G and I didn't sleep too well the night before the movers came, too nervous about the whole thing. In the end, our worries were pretty unnecessary, as it all worked out well. It will cost us more than they estimated (what a surprise) but we'll see what happens there. They came in the morning and I was telling them what to pack and they kept asking, "Alles? Es kommt alles mit?" (Everything? Everything is coming with?) I think the 4 flights of stairs and 4 rooms of stuff was quite daunting for them. Oh well, better them than me, that's all I have to say. We did tip them well at the end though.

Friday was pretty tiring for us too, as we were busy sorting things to throw away from things to keep, started ripping out the carpet (we have to take it out as part of our rental contract), took a bunch of junk to the junk yard, making sure that stuff we need like passports didn't get packed and pulling down shelf units that were built-in. The carpet was easy to rip out, but the backing underlay is horrible stuff that has basically turned to powder in several places, so we only did a few pieces and cleared out one room before deciding to leave it until Saturday. For me, the big tiring thing was going up and down our stairs a dozen or so times over the course of an hour or so. Being 7 months pregnant and many kilos heavier than usual made that a real workout. G had to go up and down many more times than me, poor thing. The actual easy thing that I was a bit nervous about was taking stuff to the junk yard, aka Wertstoffhof in German. You have to be a Munich resident to be allowed to take things there for free, so I had our rental contract with us, and you are only supposed to be allowed to dump 2 cubic meters per household per day, so I was worried they would measure us to see how much stuff we had. Yet another thing I was nervous about was that it would be a huge line-up to get into the junk yard and take forever. In the end, it was the easiest thing we did all day. Drove straight in, no one measured our stuff, no one asked for proof that we live in Munich. Dumped our stuff in the appropriate bins and drove straight out.

Saturday was another full-on working day for us. We ripped out the rest of the carpets and took down the shelves in our closet. This was such a futile thing to do. The shelves were very useful and I'm sure anyone who moves in will want shelving in there. But the way German rental contracts are, you have to take everything out. Everything. We have to remove the kitchen in the flat too, according to our contract, but we are hoping to sell that on to the next renter so we are leaving it for now. Also as mentioned, we needed to remove the carpets. So basically, you rent a flat that consists of walls, roof and floor. Oh, the toilet, bathtub and sink are staying too, so you don't have to bring your own john at least. Anyways, the shelves were a bit of a pain to get out; one because of the futile nature of the business, two because the people who put them up used a zillion different sized screws with different heads on them to put them up. So I had to keep changing the head on the drill to remove them which really slowed things down. Finally we got them down and did two more trips to the dump.

Oh, you may be wondering where we are staying in the meantime, since our flat is totally empty. A friend of ours is on holidays right now and kindly offered his place during the move. 3 cheers for TJ for being such a generous guy, we really appreciate it. I'm sure several of our other friends would have offered us space, in fact I think some did. But it's good not to intrude on anyone and also to be able to come home at the end of a day like Saturday and just shower and then hang around in your pyjamas without worrying about socialising with anyone.

Today is G's last full day in Munich, he flies out for good tomorrow morning. My flight still isn't booked, as I have to arrange when the flat transfer to the housing agents/landlord. That can't happen until Friday, as the painters are in Wednesday/Thursday next week. Soooo, sometime before November is still the best answer I can give there. Ah well, eventually we will have the full contigent of C'lonials for our attack upon Britain...