Easter

Good Friday and Monday (today) are official holidays here in Germany so there hasn't been anyone at work, since Thursday. On Thursday morning everyone at work had a small bar of chocolate from the "Easter Bunny" on their desks. In the spirit of things I have spent a lot of time away from work this weekend as well. This has made it harder to update this blog because we don't have any internet (or phone) connections at our apartment yet.

On Saturday the grocery stores were open in the morning so we grabbed some food then we rode the train back up to Kiel. We did some shopping in the mall near the train station and ordered a washing machine (to be delivered tomorrow on Tuesday), it is one of the Euro style tiny ones, to go in our tiny kitchen, that will only do one small load at a time. Then we walked across town to the IKEA in Kiel, it was pretty cold and windy at this point. (As an aside here, the weather is very changeable lately, just today it has alternated between sunshine and show showers every few hours.) We picked up some light covers, light bulbs, light fixtures and cables (another aside, new apartments here in Germany come much barer then in America; we don't even have light fixtures on the ceilings, just bare wires sticking out, so we have to hook these up ourselves), drying racks (for laundry), coat hangers, ... and walked back. Most of the rest of the time I continued to put together furniture. V and I now have a bed, two clothes racks, a dining room table with four chairs, two sitting chairs, a side table, a small couch, several small rugs, the kids each have a rug, mattress, laundry bin, and M has a side table; plus we have a general laundry basket and a drying rack.

On Sunday morning we could hear bells ringing in the churches for Easter Sunday. The plan was I fix omelettes for breakfast, then we all go for a walk together to Prince's Island. M thought we said "Princess Island" so she got dressed up in a new pink dress to meet the princesses and didn't want to put a coat on over it later (I only found out why last night when V told me what M said later). But I've gotten ahead of myself. I just finished moving the last of our luggage from our smallest "storage" room and had the kids clean up by putting all the cardboard and wrappers in there from the IKEA furniture. I was halfway through slicing the mushrooms for the omelette when I heard V yelling loudly "help, help, help" from the same room. The radiator in there didn't adjust correctly and was stuck all the way on, so it was warm in the room. She took my pliers (my only tools at the moment apart from a philips head screwdriver) and tried to adjust it. A piece (the air release) bent, almost broke off, and hot water was shooting out the crack. I bent it back so that it was a fast dripping and she got a pan to put under it. A few minutes later "help" again and this time it was broken completely off and she was holding wadded up clothes over it to keep it from streaming all over the place. I knocked on the building maintanence man's door but no one was in the entire building, everyone was at church. We didn't even have a bucket to catch the water in. There was no where to turn it off so I followed the pipes through the building and ended up in the basement where there were finally valves and cranked them shut. I saw two large watering cans down there so I took them back up the stairs and V started a relay with the kids emptying the full water cans in the tub. She also had them bring in the laundry basket and was mopping up water to keep it from spreading and soaking in with the clothes. Turning off the water didn't seem to help at all, the stream was still very strong. I grabbed a plastic IKEA fork in the kitchen, cut off a prong which looked about the right size (they have wide child sized prongs) and had V move out of the way while I jammed it in the hole and hammered it in with my pliers. This really cut the stream of water down. I took over with the water catching and dumping, we could now keep up with the volume, and V ran to find help (remember, in addition to no tools we didn't have a phone to call anyone, and almost everyone was off at church). Down the street at another building she finally got ahold of someone. It was Z we met before and V was in email contact with before we moved to Germany. Z called up the emergency handy man and half an hour later he showed up, turned the water to the building back on (it made no difference, the radiators were a separate system) and called another guy to come. Half an hour after that the other guy came, looked at the radiator and went off to get his tools. All this time Z acted as our interpreter between German and English. By this time the stream of water had slowed down considerably, after several hours of jetting out in our room. We had almost drained the entire three story apartment building of radiator water via our smallest room and the kids bucket brigade to the tub in the next room! (At one point however M threatened to stop working if I didn't promise to pay her some euros! In addition to cute she can be cutthroat.) Finally they were back with all the tools they needed and capped it. We were lucky in that we just happened to move our luggage out of the room moments before this all happened; V was unlucky however in that she scalded her hand with the hot water.

We invited Z to stay for a lunch of omelets. I finally got back to cooking, and after a late lunch we went for our walk. It was cold and late in the day so we took a shorter walk to the kids future school and they played on the playground, then asked to go back themselves because they were cold (it was also going to get dark soon). We will save prince's / princess island for another day.