Day 4

On day 4 we wake up to no internet still!  We somehow thought that overnight this would have happened.  After several phone calls and many visits to the local Telekom store.  SO frustrating.  Kim offers to watch the kids for an hour or so while Marty and I walk up (AGAIN) to the Telekom store.  The guy working there is very nice and walks Marty through all the steps he needs to do to try to reset the modem.  It's all in German and the internet/modem speak sounds like Chinese to me so I didn't catch a thing but Marty feels pretty confident.
We buy some shampoo and contact solution and although not really a date -you know us, we go all out on date nights/days - visiting the internet store and buying toiletries but after many days of constant kid chatter it feels nice to be alone and light to be out in our new town just Marty and me.  We realize how incredibly close we live to the school and town.  It always seems so much further when walking with kids.
When we get home Marty gets to work on resetting the modem.  He has 4 or 5 places where he has to enter passwords that are like 18 numbers long.  It is crazy.  A lot like German words where they have 20+ letter words.  It doesn't work the first time so he tries again and again and again.  For a couple of hours he tries every combination of passwords he can think of.  We dig out old contracts from the office desk in the house.  We try those numbers.  Nothing works.  He is getting more and more frustrated by the minute.  Then after the frustration wears off he is feeling defeated.  He tries to call their helpline but there is a 45 minute wait and we don't have a land line because it is connected to the internet which we STILL DO NOT have.  We can't wait for 45 minutes on our cell phones because they are  still Seattle cell phone plans and it costs so much per minute.  We try to get a hold of the owners of the house to try to trouble shoot.  They are very kind but can't really help. They don't know much about the internet and can't figure out why it isn't working.  They wrote all the passwords meticulously for us and for some reason it still doesn't work.  After several hours of this the owners text back with some old, outdated password.  And lo and behold it somehow works!!  We are connected and up and running.  Right around the same time we get an email saying that our boxes have arrived at Tegel/Berlin airport and are ready to be picked up (after a 2 day delay)  WOW!!  It was like Christmas around here. Once the internet connected the kids ran happily to their rooms for some unadulterated screen time!!

Julie and Micha say they are willing to help us with our boxes.  They tell us about a place that you can rent a truck for 30 Euro per day.  We honestly COULD NOT have done this without them.  Without a truck Marty would have had to go by himself at least 3 or 4 times with the back car seats put down just to get everything home.  Micha and Julie drive the truck and we lead in the car.  We show up at this huge warehouse and ask around where we should go.  There are boxes everywhere and workers FLYING by us on forklifts.  It was like a live Rokenbok village.  We are led to one room where they have a file with our name on it.  Yay... they know our name.  That guy sends us to the Customs office.  I swear this office is from the WWII.  It is dimly lit and there are 6 or so windows with closed frosted glass.  There is a sign that says you need to knock on the window and then wait for someone to answer. Marty knocks on one window but it is the wrong window and he is scolded in the German way and told to knock on a window down the line.  He knocks on that window and then begins what I like to refer to as the "box Nazi"  No boxes for you!!  Straight out of Seinfeld.  The guy started out super grumpy.  He asked a bunch of questions.  We had forgotten to bring our registration of residency.  The Customs Gestapo says we may have to pay up to 4,000 to 5,000 Euro in customs taxes.  The gestapo guy asks why we are moving to Berlin and Marty answers "for the experience."  Then Gestapo guy proclaims that so many people are moving to Berlin.  Micha decides to crack the joke that "we have 'the blond one' to thank for us moving here" referring to Trump.  The ice was broken!!  Gestapo guy starts laughing then quickly catches himself and says "I don't know what I can say to that from an official standpoint, but personally I totally understand"   I have never been thankful for one thing about Trump but for this small thing, that we could bond over the sad, sad state of current American politics, I was thankful.  He tells us that if everything in our boxes is over 6 months old we should be fine but he will need to see in the boxes to verify this.  We are then ushered into another room with even more boxes and even faster fork lift drivers.  I wanted to take a photo but am completely yelled at by some woman that works there.  All of my German speaking family has abandoned me and I'm stuck with a really bitchy woman screaming at me in German and demanding me to hand over my cell phone so she can make sure I didn't take any photos.  I mime my way out of it and hopefully reassure her that I didn't actually take any photos.  We finally see our collection of 13 boxes.  Coming at us at a high speed on a fork lift.  Gestapo guy meets us and hands Marty a knife and tells him to open a box.  He sorts through the first box - it's mostly just boots and coats (I really loaded up for the winter because I HATE to be cold and Berlin is super cold in the winter) he is not at all interested in my boots and coats.  Marty gets to the next box and it is one of his 3 computer screens.  They have a shboxes.ort discussion.  There is laughter and even some camaraderie.  He says we are good to go.  We cannot believe that after all of our panicked phone calls and exchanges with Howard he actually came through in the end.  We shouldn't have doubted.

We end up paying 28 Euro and then as soon as our boxes are loaded up onto another forklift for a speedy trip to the door it starts to downpour.... like tropical, crazy amounts of rain on an 85+ degree day, downpour.  We can't even see outside through all of the rain.  We give it a minute or two or 10 and then load up the boxes during one of the lighter periods of rain.  And just like that we head home (us in the car and Micha and Julie in the truck) WITH OUR BOXES.  We cannot believe we actually are reunited with out things.

When we get home I actually don't want any of these boxes.  It just looks like SO much work to unload and put away.  There is definitely something to be said about living lighter with fewer things.  We were planning on taking Micha and Julie out to eat as a thank you but because of the downpour a big section of Zehlendorf had flooded.  It took us an extra 30 minutes to get home and we didn't want to go back out in it.  So I pulled everything we had from the cupboards and made a pretty tasty evening German meal (Abend brot)

I can get used to these kinds of dinner.   Not only was the food good but the company even better.  We have to pull up an extra chair because with my sister, Micha and Julie there are 7 and on the 4th day we have guests again for dinner and it is really started to feel like home.  We decide that with Micha and Julie living just 15-20 minutes away that we should start a family dinner night once a week.  Life in Berlin is looking pretty good!!

We go to bed feeling happy that we have family here, that we have been reunited with our boxes and that we have internet. Yay! For day 4.