just john

So, I'm sitting here in the restaurant and it's getting close to 11:00pm. I was thinking earlier what an absolute marvel of technology it is for me to be able to sit here in Germany and communicate with my friends who are 3000 miles away. 20 years ago, people like me had to rely on letters that took over a week and atrociously expensive phone calls routed through Ma Bell. I should know, I was in Europe 20 years ago.

Starting to get a little lonely here. No land line yet and the calls to Bill are very expensive. Maybe next week I'll be able to add that to list of accomplishments. Dave's been good about sending lots of email - sometimes you just want to see something by someone who's a native English speaker. I've also waxed a bit nostalgic and started remebering all the endearing things about my friends that make them special. Even JC has his high points.

Fair warning; the computer is still hobbling a bit and I don't have the luxury of speel check at the moment. Any errors will simply have to stand. Typing is getting a bit confusing as German keyboards are different. The "z" and "y" keys are swapped, the question mark is elsewhere, and virtually the entire cast of special characters above the numbers and punctuation seems all scrambled. There are, however, keys in place to type umlaut (2 dots over) a, e, o, and u. Go figure that one out.

I spent most of the day assembling some of my furniture, installing light fixtures and finishing off the kitchen floor. I now have mounted lights in every room, an acceptable kitchen floor, part of a wardrobe (no closet, remember), and one night table. Typical stuff for moving into an apartment in Germany. I do, however, have the luxury of being able to stay at a hotel during all this so I don't have to sleep in the clutter. I think checking out of the hotel will make it official. I will be living in Germany. Somehow, I just don't feel quite ready for it.

How's this for disjointed:  Earlier in the morning, I went (again) to Ikea to shop for said wardrobe. Somehow I managed to stuff a 2 meter high by 1 meter wide mirrored door into the back of my station wagon along with all the other crap. Definielyl a day of heavy lifting. Ikea was it's usual Saturday surge of people that would put Wal-Mart to shame. Speaking of station wagons, they're incredibly popular here. You pay a premium in all the marques for a combi-wagon which seems to be what people would rather have than a sedan. Strange, very strange.

No kitchen yet either. My basic German is not too bad but using the Ikea kitchen planner is hard. They left off teaching words for "cabinet that the sink mounts in" and so forth. I plan to try it later tonight with the online translator.

I didn't even get to drive my new car today (seems eveyone is getting a new car these days except JC).