A Series of Lasts

With just about three weeks to go we have started a series of “lasts”-last time to do something, last time to go to a certain restaurant or favorite spot.  This weekend was the last time going to our favorite flea market.  Sigh!

We found this flea market quite by accident a few years back and have been going regularly. It’s fun, its cheap entertainment, they make good churros there and sell cheap produce in addition to all the eclectic, weird and plain old used stuff. I love this flea market – it is so refreshingly different from the sterile shopping malls with their cooled down standard stores, their food courts and all their shiny new and often utterly useless, overpriced and/or ridiculous things that will look even more useless or ridiculous next year.

Our flea market is messy, loud, colorful, unconventional, often hot – always interesting, never sterile.  It sports countless sellers with their wares on cheap tables or directly on the floor, anything from clothing to toys, bikes, sometimes even vintage items, tools, electronics, crafts, housewares, stuff I don’t know what it is, Mexican music, a barber, produce stalls and a smelly fish monger  – everything. Over the last few years I have become rather good at finding things I need (well, okay, and many I don’t need but like) and can’t remember more than a handful of things I have not been able to find there (e.g. a pair of skiing pants for my son but then, hey, this is coastal California in mid-summer I probably won’t get one in the store either).  The trick is not trying to go for to many things, in all this chaos the mind can’t focus on too many different shapes and forms one needs to look out for when, for example, simultaneously looking for a tennis racket, a ornate frame that would look good when sprayed in hot pink and Pokemon cards.

To tell you the truth, going to a flea market when one really really can’t buy anything because whatever it is one buys one just needs to just pack it up and store it for a year is no fun, it is actually depressing.  But I wanted to go and found an excuse  and so we took one last stroll around the place bought a few mangoes, marveled at things we could have bought under normal circumstances and then left.

Ironically, for the first time in months I needed to go to the mall afterwards to buy some cosmetics for my upcoming business trip – and even this die-hard flea market aficionado does not get cosmetics there.  It was cool – which was a define plus on a day with mid-90s temperatures but that is all the positive I can say for it.  All the same stores, all the same stuff, all the same food, all so boring and so many people thinking that this is a great way to spend a brilliant summer weekend day.

It was definitely my last time at the mall – I wont miss it one bit.  The flea market, however, is a very different story …

Worries

What’s in my future: Sunday Closed
(c) Tina Baumgarter

My husband calls me a Worrier-Princess and although I contradict him loudly and energetically most of the times I have to admit – just between you and I – that he might have a bit of a point there, occasionally.  I tend to worry: in the” sweating the small stuff” kind of way. Big worries don’t faze me much, maybe because I am a lucky person so far and have not had do deal with major bad stuff in my life.  But the small stuff, I tell you …

So instead of worrying about my son being miserable after transplanting him (I am fairly confident that he will be just fine after a bit of bickering in the beginning) I worry about:

the weather – seriously, this is on or very near the top of my list. I mean California is hard to beat – drought or not – and German winter weather is cruel and unusual punishment in my mind. Cold, rain, snow, seriously snow – I hardly know how that stuff looks anymore – and fog.  Now, I should be used to fog, having lived in San Francisco and all – but trust me, German or rather Lake Constance fog in November is worse.  A lot, and you can’t just hop in the car, drive to the South Bay and bask in the sun.

My house, my tiny little Californian house (1500 sqf) – is palatial by German standards (at least outside of the top 10% – and yes, we do have them, too, there).  Our apartment will be 850 sqf or thereabouts for three people, incl. 2 home offices. If I dwell long enough on this fact I feel the urge to have my head examined.

The quality of what passes for Chinese Food in Germany.  I don’t even like Chinese food much but occasionally we crave the Goa something Tofu and so we go to the Lucky Star Restaurant or whatever it is called and order it, on the occasion we’ll have two orders.  Those little pieces of meat in a brown sauce they serve in German “Chinese Restaurants” do not qualify for Chinese food by any stretch of imagination, its German food with cut up meat instead of a whole hunk and a few cashews thrown in for good measure and exotic appeal.

Even worse: Sushi!  I love Sushi and Sushi 100s of kilometers from the next ocean is not Sushi, or not safe or at least not yum. We have Sushi at least once a week – I already miss it. Just writing about it makes me homesick for California – and I haven’t even left yet.

Sunday shopping – my friends and family in Germany insist that nobody needs to and nobody wants to shop on Sundays.  Oh, if they only knew …  I am not a big shopper, I find it boring and stuff like shoe shopping I do when I need shoes, not for therapy or recreation.  Still, the fact that I can get food on a Sunday, in fact that I can buy food on a Sunday for Monday and Tuesday, is brilliant.  Of course, I can do it on Saturday morning – but who wants to think about Monday on Saturday morning?  It is better now, I am told, with many stores open late on Saturday – but still, I know for six months I will forget to buy milk or bananas or chocolate, will grab my bag and wallet and run to the store to get it just to realize that – darn, it is Sunday again.  So either I go without chocolate, or I head over to the next gas station and buy an overpriced bar there (seriously, German gas station sell anything, esp. booze, to the poor people like me who missed their Saturday shopping window of opportunity).

The more jaded of my friends look at me and say “seriously, no chocolate on Sunday, totally a first world problem, stop complaining!”

True …. still!

 

 

 

 

Saying Good-Bye

With just about 4 weeks to go the worst part of leaving anywhere anytime has started: saying good-bye to people.

The first was my hairdresser.  Big deal – not! the guys among you probably think and “OMG, big deal!” I know the gals among you think.  It totally is a big deal, a huge deal in fact.  Not only is finding a new hairdresser in a new town a major hassle and catastrophes are bound to happen (thankfully I am past the age where the worth of my personality seems to depend on my haircut and the color of my lipstick – but still) but also he has been one my hairdresser for over a decade, our kids are almost the same age and though I have never met his son I feel like I know him because we talk about our rascals.  The guy did my hair for my wedding and we have talked about everything from design to politics.  Never gossip, though, as it is of no interest to either one of us.  Only once in all those years did I have to go back and say “this cut does not work, please do it over”.

In short, the is a treasure and I will have to live without him for a year …

Yesterday we saw some friends for a bit of an impromptu pool party. I went to school with these people, like 15 years ago and we see each other not terribly frequently but we see each other – and what is more, if I should get the urge to see one of them it can be arranged fairly easily.  Well, we said our good-byes and everybody promised to look us up should they find themselves unexpectedly roaming southern Germany.  With one exception we and they know they wont be roaming southern Germany either unexpectedly or otherwise – but it felt less permanent with that option in mind.

And now I am going back to what has become my second full-time job: Putting stuff in boxes and piling them in a garage that used to feel big and spacious but is closing in on me very quickly.

 

Sadness

As I am frantically working and in each spare second think about color schemes and whether I will need three pairs of strappy sandals in Germany or just two the news of the Malaysian Air plane being shot down hits the world and makes me pause.

It’s the second plane that crashes in a short period of time but this one hits close to home.  About 100 people on this plane were on their way to Melbourne for the annual AIDS conferences and as such are people I once considered colleagues.  10 years ago I worked in that field, specifically on a diagnostic device that made monitoring the disease cheaper and more suited for what is in the community referred to as resource-poor settings, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia and Central and Latin America.  My Greencard was obtained on a National Interest Waiver based on the work we did and some of the people on the plane I knew then and probably met at conferences and meetings and on conference calls.

It is a terrible tragedy whether the people on the plane are famous researchers or do something else for their living, but to loose 100 people who worked tirelessly to fight a still incurable disease which afflicts predominantly people in the poorest countries and wrecks havoc there is beyond comprehension.

There is little more I can say, I feel numb and since I am not the praying type there is nothing I can do.  My thoughts are with the families of the victims and the HIV community who lost so many great and dedicated people.

 

4 More Weeks

We have been quietly working away on making this Germany thing happen but after last year’s experience where we talked about it all the time to basically everybody – and then it did not happen –  I felt a little freaked about talking about it too much too early.

Well, I guess I can safely say it is not too early anymore: the house is rented out, the rental agreement for the apartment there is in the works, our son has his spot at school and the flights are booked.

Much remains to be done, a hell of a lot in fact, and I am getting a bit dizzy when thinking about emptying everything out here (we are renting furnished but still there are so many things to put away) and then starting over there.

It isn’t just putting stuff away when we get there – that’d be easy – not all that much will fit into those three or four suitcases we are allowed to take – but somehow furnishing an apartment on the cheap and fixing up whatever the previous renter left to make it fit my style (my style is really the family style, my husband does not feel too strongly about colors and things like round vs. square tables and my 10 year old doesn’t get a say in it – just to keep me sane).

My ambition is to spend very little on new stuff.  First and foremost I am cheap, buying new furniture is expensive and after a year I have to be happy if somebody pays me a few dollars to take it off my hands.  Secondly, I like the idea of reuse and upcycling, in fact I have read about it obsessively over the last months, magazines, websites, blogs, etc. Thirdly I am a tree-hugger and proud of it.  If I can keep something out of the landfill I am all for it.  The whole buy-and-toss in ever faster cycles does not make sense to me.  Finally, I am a hunter-gatherer, I truly appreciate the experience of going to a flea market or garage sale and finding something, a gem that others overlooked, seeing the potential in an ugly lamp with a new lamp shade, that wooden chair stripped of that awful fabric and reupholstered.  Really fun!

Now, I have never reupholstered a thing in my life so we’ll see whether reality lives up to my glossy-DIY magazine inspired dreams.

I keep telling myself that it will be fun and halfway believe it – then I have visions of myself staple gun in hand, glue all over my face fighting with some stubborn piece of furniture or fabric bleary-eyed some time after midnight – and I wonder whether I am a bit naive.

I probably am but then naivety might not the worst frame of mind to tackle this.