In Deutschland angekommen

In 2008 we posted on this blog 93 times; in 2010, 25 times. Many of the latter 25 were little snippets, not full-fledged posts. During this period of declining output our readership has dwindled from the international millions who eagerly and confidently awaited a weekly post, to the scattered four, who occasionally check the blog, scratch their heads, and wonder why we never blog anymore.

The tide now stands reversed. We have arrived in Berlin, settled in new quarters, and are resolved to chronicle our adventures here for the record of posterity and the pleasure of our (four) readers. Lia is especially serious about this--she ordered me to write this post, even at the price of a delay in our nightly reading of Pride and Prejudice.

Our hegira from the stomping grounds of Elihu Yale to those of the Prussian kings was an epic one: heroic packing on Saturday, herculean moving on Monday, colossal cleaning on Tuesday, and a marathon flight on Wednesday. Deus ex machina came in the form of my mom, who arrived late Friday night and worked like a galley slave until a merciful train returned her to JFK, and thence home to Utah. Mom also furnished us with a hotel for Monday and Tuesday nights, sparing us two agonizing evenings on the floors of a bare apartment.

The flight was comparatively uneventful. We took off around 6 p.m. EST, or around midnight German time. The girls slept some and did a lot of reading and drawing. I even had a few idle moments to scratch out the poems featured in an earlier post. Lia was a row behind me with Katharine, though, and had a decidedly harder, but not fatal, flight.

The real ordeal was the transfer of our luggage from Berlin Tegel to our apartment in Schoeneberg. We had eleven items of luggage--every earthly article that is to sustain us for the next year. Julia could helpfully drag one suitcase. Do the math, and you'll get a sense for how much Lia and I were lugging (restoring the ancient meaning to the term luggage). Merciful strangers intervened at various stages of our journey--a bus ride, followed by a subway journey with a line-switch on the way. I'm not sure how we survived but we did. Mercifully too, our landlord was at our place cleaning it when we arrived. We promptly collapsed.

The first few nights were, as was to be expected, among the longest of our lives. Katharine especially was totally oblivious to considerations of time zone or hemisphere. She made long and frequent visits to every room in the house, including and especially our room. This too we survived.

On Saturday we decided to take a break from responsible activities like grocery and houseware shopping for some real American tourism. This of course meant, at this early date, a visit to Brandenburg Gate and a stroll down Unter den Linden. We were disposed to be impressed and we were impressed. The girls, however, were more delighted by the adjacent fountains than by the famous monument; more pleased to pet the local tourist-trap ponies than to take a walk down history's lane. But they did walk uncomplainingly and long (Katharine, of course, rode on our shoulders).

On Sunday we went to the Dahlem ward for the first time. We couldn't be happier with our ward--a German congregation that bends over backward to accomodate its ex pat contingent. Some young American (or quasi-American) moms immediately befriended Lia, and the family of an American Embassy employee even had us over for Sunday dinner (in that household, popcorn and ice cream--quite literally, and nothing else; the girls thought the Golden Age had come again). Our ward even has some celebrities, like my sister-in-law Jini's mission president and mission mom. Jini liked to depict them as possessed of a certain Prussian rigour, but now we know better. President Rakow is a saintly, jolly man and his wife is even better. Sunday was our best day yet.

This morning (Tuesday) we visited the Charlottenberg palace. Two of the girls wore the Renaissance dresses that were so integral a part of Lia's preparations for our departure. Katharine, out of sheer cussedness, decided that she "did not look beautiful" in her dress, and went in street clothes. We didn't go in the palace this time--just toured the gardens and the mausoleum that King Friedrich-Wilhelm III built after the death of his beloved Luise, who died young, aged 34. We saw two swans; Katharine stepped in the byproducts of one of them and, when once again hoisted onto my shoulders, helpfully shared her booty with my shirt. Eli spied the swans first and came running to the rest of us shouting, "I have seen a swan, and it is bleeding my heart to see it!" Our latter-day princesses in full custom elicited a thousand appreciative looks and smiles.

It hasn't all been roses and Bratwurst, however. I have been abominably sick with the flu and more besides, and a few hours ago I threw out my back to boot. This has been a pain for me but a huge burden for Lia. Never very valuable in the first place, I have been rendered more than uncommonly useless by my illness and injury--a negative value, one should say, a positive impediment. But no hardship can permanently sour one's spirits when one lives in Berlin (excepting the historical epoch from 1914 to 1989 and the Thirty Years War). We are happy with our accommodations, our ward, our new life. And someday on futurity's distant horizion, I'll settle down to work on my dissertation.