Half in the bag and not knowing it.

David and I have spent the last week getting our lives in order. We now have our work visas, a certified letter attesting to the fact that we live at our address (which, apparently you need to do absolutely everything), a bank account (also necessary), and we are well on our way to having internet access (scheduled for the 25th). We have also staked out all of the good grocery stores, bakeries, internet kiosks, and we FINALLY found somewhere to get Stella dog food of decent quality. During all this new life arranging, we both noticed that we were still quite tired and sort of fussy.

After nearly a week, we couldn’t blame it on jetlag any more. David thought it might be a virus, I thought maybe it was the stress of moving. Turns out, we were pretty much half in the bag most days by 2pm. What with the absurd access, affordability and acceptability of beer, we would have a beer with lunch, a beer after we walked around and were feeling hot, after shopping for food, after looking for a dog food store…you get the picture. We were on a bender – a near constant, low-level beer buzz during any daytime (don’t even mention nighttime) activity. Now that we put two and two together (kind of hard when you are loaded), we managed to impose a time and quantity limit on this sort of behavior.

Tonight I didn’t have a beer all the way until dinner. I have to work tomorrow, you know.

What else? Wow, the quality of food here is amazing. Seriously. Even Aldi has a big selection of organic foods – fruit, juice, eggs, cheese, milk, pasta. It’s weird, even the one euro pizza we got at Lidl (a big Aldi-type store) had fresh mozzarella and sliced cherry tomatoes. I really like this. It’s a good thing we walk miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers) everyday. Otherwise, my penchant for beer and bread would wreak havoc on my waistline.

Furniture update: no improvements. We can’t bring ourselves to return to Ikea and all of our traipsing about Hamburg has found us a couple of very high-end furniture stores we have no business in. We are, however, on to something. The welcome center, where we got our visas, gave us this big, fat, glossy magazine with lots of information about Hamburg. Better still, there is a long list of vegetarian restaurants and, more important right now, a list of furniture stores. We have several options, from a used warehouse where the city sells all of the discarded furniture put out on trash day up to a “dings-and-dents” furniture store that offers 50% savings for “small defects.”

We’ll see if we can stay sober long enough to secure a couch for our “flat.”

On a completely unrelated note, David and I are both looking into language courses – the one we’ve heard about from the IEA (our employers) was 345 eur for 8 weeks. Seems kind of high. I’ve heard that you can do state run classes for lots less. A side motivation for state classes: I’d like to put all the tax money The Man is extracting to good use by taking advantage of the lovely social programs I hear so much about.

Stella is well. She is a great apartment dog and took her first train ride yesterday. But, that’s enough material for a whole other post. We both start work tomorrow, so we’ll see what excitement is in store.

I still love Hamburg!