One of the many things I enjoy about living in a city is that I have no yard. I know this sounds crazy because the dream is to get married and get a dog and have a baby and get a house with a big yard in which your dog and kids can play. I have to say that the thing I think people most underestimate when they dream of a big, luxurious yard is the amount of work that goes into maintaining a big, luxurious yard. When I think about the houses we had in Washington and Delaware, the mowing and weeding and planting and landscaping were not only time consuming, they were nerve-wracking. I knew we would be selling those houses eventually, and I had to maintain that curb appeal. Don't get me wrong. I would rather spend 45 minutes mowing the lawn than 15 minutes vacuuming, but the point is that now that we have an apartment on the 7th floor and a deck, I don't spend my Saturdays yearning for the smell of gas and the hum of the cheap motor in our non-self-propelled lawnmower.
Having said that, an interesting thing happened about 2 weeks ago. I stepped outside to check on the progress of the construction site next door (more on that later), and something caught my eye. Across the deck from me, next to the grill, there was something green emerging between the floor boards.
Weeds. The bane of my domestic existence during seven years of home ownership has somehow found me in the middle of one of Europe's largest cities. (Sidebar: our rental house in Monterey had what is fondly referred to as a "natural forest-scape" yard. This basically means there is minimal grass, some trees, roots, moss, and weeds which really only had to be weed-whacked about 5 times in the 9 months we lived there). Annika swiftly spotted them and happily snatched them up. This is an activity that I hope she enjoys as time goes on...it will make her weekends a lot more enjoyable.
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| You read correctly above...this is on the 7th floor...in the middle of Berlin. |
In other news, we have been living next to a huge construction site since we arrived here. This has made actually using our deck a less-than-appealing option...at least between the hours of 0700-1730 when the workers are out there drilling and sawing and hammering and otherwise making noise and dust. This is partly (read: completely) responsible for the fact that one or all of us have had some kind of respiratory malaise for all but 3 of the weeks we've been here. On the up side, we think they may be mostly finished with the outside part of the building, so our hacking days may be behind us. Apart from the inhalation of potentially dangerous concrete remnants, it has been kind of cool watching these huge dwellings develop literally from the ground up.
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| Annika, surveying the scene. |
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| You can't see it, but the workers are flirting with her. |
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| This is how they get a staircase into a building. |
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| That hole is where the staircase is going. |
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| Kind of cool...would have been cooler after 7 AM. |
Oh, yes. I forgot to mention the one major drawback of having a construction site next door. They begin work promptly at 0700 and not a minute later. However, on a number of days, they begin quite a few minutes earlier. I am not often in a position to sleep past 7, but on the rare occasion when I can, it is irksome (read: infuriating) when the workday begins as it always does: with a man inexplicably banging on a metal pole with something else made of metal. This goes on for about 15 minutes and then doesn't happen at all for the rest of the day...until around 1245 when it's time for Annika's nap.
All complaining aside (for now), the deck is amazing. Our former living room/only furniture now resides in its rightful place...outside. On some of the warmer summer evenings, I enjoyed taking a glass of wine and my computer out for some free Google voice conversations with people back home. On another occasion, I enjoyed just standing out there looking at the city below and listening, along with the rest of the people in my building and the one across the street, to a group of about 6 men and women scream at each other in Turkish and German. Mostly, it was nice to be able to understand what the German yellers were saying. From what I can tell, one of the women thought one of the men was a pig and not very smart. He politely disagreed, in Turkish. Another man respectfully told the woman she was crazy. A different woman replied thoughtfully in Turkish, and they all went back inside.
So, considering that we still are able to have a grill on which to cook our encased German meats, a space where we may one day be able to enjoy the sunshine (or what's left of it for this year), and the weeding only takes me 2 minutes, I think it's a win for the deck.
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| The rebar is gone now, and soon too the noise with it, but the grill will remain. |
Coming soon (meaning probably this year):
- a trip to the Ostsee (Baltic Sea) complete with a jog and bike ride to Poland
- A visit from the Schwiegereltern (in-laws) from Chicago
- The Berlin Marathon (hopefully...we'll see how it goes on Sunday)
- Adventures at the park
Bis zum nächsten mal Freunde!
