Reconciliation

By the middle of March 07 we had decided to rent an apartment in the small town of Mahlow about 8 miles north of the Rolls-Royce site and just outside the Berlin city limit.




1st Floor, above silver car front end!



Empty lounge!




One of our friends pointed out to us that on the train ride from Mahlow into Berlin, you can see the witness of the Berlin wall only about 1/2 mile north of us, easily visible from the train, just before entering what was West Berlin. The witness of the border is really just an ashpalt track where the DDR (East Germany) border guards used to drive along checking the border.
Getting back to the 21st century, we were allowed to get into our apartment on 30th March rather than the actual lease date of 1st April. So we scheduled to pick up our belongings (including car) that came from the USA in a 40 foot container.

Early on 30th March we took a train into Berlin to rent a removal van, drove to the storage facility, loaded up the van, drove down to the apartment, had a 'walk through' to make sure all was as it should be and moved our stuff in. "Moving in ' meant squeezing the king size, 17" deep mattress up a couple of flights of stairs and over a banister and then repeating the exercise with the couch, quite a feat. We then had to get the van back to the rental place before 3pm as it was booked for someone else later that day, we actually got back at about 2pm, loads of time!
We had actually picked up the car the week before and left the other things in storage for a week.

Here's a couple of pictures of the container and car as it was unloaded.

Following the car unloading, the next week I took it to the registration place to get it a German license plate. That was quite an experience but a total disaster as far as getting the license plate was concerned. It didn't help that on the day it snowed hard and the the snowflakes were the size of dinner plates. The car registration is still not complete yet but we'll save that story for a new day just to say that we are ALMOST there (we think!).